assessing interactions among education social insurance and labor market policies in morocco this paper develops a general equilibrium model to assess the impact that integrated reforms of macroeconomic education and social protection policies can have on employment the model presents three innovations first it formalizes the production of skills in the economy by following sex age cohorts through the various levels of the education and training systems given dropout and repetition rates second it incorporates a module that projects social insurance expenditures as a function of the demographic structure of the country and the rules of the pension system finally it develops a very detailed description of the labor market where informality reflects strategic decisions by workers and not necessarily exclusion the model is applied to morocco the results of various simulations illustrate the importance of coordinating macro education and social protection policies in order to achieve meaningful effects on employment levels in particular the author show that isolated interventions to improve the internal efficiency of the education system can aggravate the unemployment problem that subsidies to investments are more efficient in sectors intensive in skilled labor and that not controlling the growth of pension expenditures and the tax wedge can depress employment in the formal sector

inferring market power under the threat of entry the case of the brazilian cement industry consider a setting where threatened rather than actual import competition restrains a domestic oligopoly s prices i show that not modelling the entry threat may underestimate the true degree of market power as incumbents blunted price responses to demand shocks resemble perfectly competitive behavior evidence from brazilian cement markets points to an important role for imports in determining domestic cement prices despite the near absence of imports on assuming autarky models with market power are rejected in favor of competition among incumbents however allowing a role for imports rejects the autarky assumption and precludes one from rejecting the presence of market power

interfirm rivalry in a repeated game an empirical test of tacit collusion rivalry in the vancouver retail gasoline market is modeled as a repeated game service station demand cost and intertemporal reaction functions are estimated from daily data on individual station prices costs and sales these functions are then used to calculate noncooperative and cooperative solutions to the constitutent game and the actual outcome of the repeated game the actual outcome is found to be substantially less lucrative than the monopoly solution nevertheless all stations are better off than if they played their noncooperative strategies in every period copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

competitive pricing by a price leader we examine the problem of pricing in a market where one brand acts as a price leader we develop a procedure to estimate a leader s price rule which is optimal given a sales target objective and allows for the inclusion of demand forecasts we illustrate our estimation procedure by calibrating this optimal price rule for both the leader and the follower using data on past sales and prices from the mid size sedan segment of the u s automobile market our results suggest that a leader follower system stackelberg seems more consistent with the pricing behavior in this market than a mutually independent pricing rule nash we also find that our optimal price rule explains this market data better than other pricing schemes that do not account for optimizing behavior on the part of the leader and the follower

alternative regulatory methods and firm efficiency stochastic frontier evidence from the u s electricity industry the use of incentive regulation and other alternative regulatory programs in u s electricity markets has grown during the past two decades within a stochastic frontier framework i investigate the effect of individual programs on the technical efficiency of a large set of coal and natural gas generation units i find that those programs tied directly to generator performance and those that modify traditional fuel cost pass through programs to provide a greater incentive to reduce fuel costs are associated with greater efficiency levels other programs have no statistical association with efficiency levels

dynamic efficiency estimation the shadow cost approach is developed in the context of the dynamic duality model of intertemporal decision making to formulate theoretical and econometric models of dynamic efficiency the dynamic efficiency model is applied to a panel of 72 u s major investor owned electric utilities using fossil fuel fired steam electric power generation over the period 1986 1999 the major results show that most electric utilities underutilized fuel relative to the aggregated labor and the maintenance input and overutilized capital in production states adopting a deregulation plan improve the performance of utilities in terms of the technical efficiency of variable inputs

cyclical quality adjustment in the labor market 1 introductionthe u s unemployment rate fell to very low levels during the 1990s even more impressively the unemployment rate for minorities and less educated individuals fell disproportionately convergence of relative unemployment rates in expansions and divergence in recessions has been a feature of the u s economy over the last 30 years there are many possible reasons for this feature for example if the costs of hiring and firing less skilled labor are low one would expect these individuals to have very procyclical employment in this paper i explore an alternative model when there is an excess supply of labor high skilled people take jobs that would normally be occupied by less skilled people in expansions the process reverses with less skilled workers getting access to jobs that they would normally not attain i refer to this process as cyclical quality adjustment reder 1955 p 834 was one of the first to discuss how hiring standards adjust to business cycle conditions quality variations in labor markets arise through upgrading and downgrading of members of the labor force relative to the jobs they are to fill when applicants become scarce employers tend to lower the minimum standards upon which they insist as a condition for hiring a worker to fill a particular job and vice versa when applicants become plentiful since then many papers have developed this idea theoretically and many economic commentators appear to share this view of the labor market for example the economic report of the president states that a strong labor market is particularly important to less advantaged groups in the labor market such as workers with less education younger workers racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants when employers find it hard to fill vacancies they are more willing to hire and train workers whom they might pass over when they have fewer openings and an abundance of applicants council of economic advisors 1999 p 103 likewise the expansion during the 1990s spawned many newspaper articles about the improvement in the types of jobs available to less skilled applicants however there is little systematic empirical work about changes in job assignment in the united states over the business cycle the empirical work in this paper seeks to redress this situation cyclical assignment changes are important for many reasons as mentioned earlier job upgrading is a potential explanation for the greater cyclical variation of employment experienced by less skilled workers it is well known that the unemployment rates of less skilled individuals and minorities are more countercyclical relative to more skilled individuals clark and summers 1981 kydland 1984 keane and prasad 1993 hoynes 1999 the standard explanation for this effect is that low ability workers are more likely to be laid off in downturns because training and hiring costs are lower for these workers no commensurate attention has been paid to the issue of how the decision of who to hire changes over the business cycle however assignment models present a natural explanation for the greater procyclicality of employment of the less skilled both the adjustment cost hypothesis and the upgrading hypothesis imply that less skilled workers will have more procyclical employment empirically they are distinguishable because the upgrading explanation implies that jobs obtained by comparable workers should vary systematically over the cycle the adjustment cost hypothesis relates to the composition of those whose jobs are terminated second these mechanisms suggest a reason why wages are particularly procyclical for job changers recent studies using panel data have indicated that the wages of job starters are much more procyclical than the wages of workers who do not change jobs researchers have suggested various explanations for this result beaudry and dinardo 1991 and macleod and malcomson 1993 present contracting models in which the wages of job starters depend on the state of the labor market when they join the firm

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

oligopoly competition and welfare some recent developments in this essay we wish to highlight three particular areas in the enormous literature on oligopoly where we believe recent work has proved particularly productive and illuminating one recent development of interest has been the application of game theory to the well known interdependence of expectations problem while interesting in its own right it has also had a major impact in clarifying thinking about rational strategic choice and the role of information in affecting outcomes our view is that the information structure of the oligopoly problem plays a crucial role in conditioning the nature of its solution and this is the first topic that we propose to discuss these developments in theory have occurred in tandem with and indeed have stimulated empirical work one important empirical problem is that of identifying the exercise of monopoly power in practice and recent work has focussed on the problem of inferring conduct from observed price output configurations this obviously has a high order of policy importance and it constitutes the second topic in our discussion

how to measure labour market effects of immigration a review abstract this paper surveys available empirical evidence on labour market effects of immigration many different approaches have been used already to try to find out whether immigration hurts the labour market opportunities of natives no doubt new approaches will follow in the future as globalization will keep the migration issue on the agenda this literature review discusses the different approaches concentrating on both the methodology and the results at the end it tries to summarize available evidence

individual attitudes towards skilled migration an empirical analysis across countries it is commonly argued that skilled immigration benefits the destination country through several channels yet only a limited number of countries report having policies in place aimed at increasing the intake of skilled immigrants why in this paper we analyse the factors that affect a direct measure of individual attitudes towards skilled migration we focus on two main channels the labour market and the welfare state we find that more educated natives are less likely to favour skilled immigration consistent with the labour market channel while richer people are more likely to do so in accordance with the welfare state channel under the tax adjustment model our findings thus suggest that the labour market competition threat perceived by skilled natives in the host countries might be driving the observed cautious policies

productivity growth in u s agriculture under dynamic adjustment a dynamic measure of productivity growth adjusted for deviations from the long run equilibrium is established within an adjustment cost framework an empirical application to u s agriculture is presented which permits identifying the dynamic linkages between technical change and productivity growth in u s agriculture total factor productivity as dynamically measured grew at 1 50 per annum the combined effect of scale quality adjusted input growth and long run disequilibrium input use contributes only 3 44 of the growth while technical change dominates the growth of total factor productivity

systematic departures from the frontier a framework for the analysis of firm inefficiency departures from a production or cost frontier may reflect the systematic effect of conditions that contribute to inefficiency to test whether some portion of frontier function departures can be systematically explained the frontier inefficiency error component is modeled as a function of various causal factors and a random component the functional form of the inefficiency error term model is chosen to assure strict one sidedness preliminary empirical results generated from electric utility data suggest the superiority of including both systematic and random components in the inefficiency error term

nonparametric measurement of productive efficiency in the presence of regulation abstract during the late 1970s and 1980s volatility in the demand for natural gas in the united states created havoc in the industry s transmission sector managers of firms were presented with the task of improving productive efficiency in an uncertain and regulated industry we measure the relative performance of 20 pipelines using data envelopment analysis dea to produce a regulation constrained minimum cost frontier with the results we construct a fisher productivity index fpi results show that despite productive efficiency decline for most years most firms experienced improvement in technical efficiency and technical progress in most years most of the productive efficiency decline was due to scale diseconomies

concentration and advertising in consumer and producer markets the effect of concentration on advertising has long been the subject of debate on the theoretical side two approaches may be distinguished starting with kaldor i 949 50 an analysis in which the assumed purpose of advertising is to make profits but not necessarily maximum profits has been developed by sutton i974 additionally building on the original work of dorfman and steiner i954 and others cable i972 has provided a profit maximising model of the way in which concentration affects the optimal amount of advertising both approaches predict a systematic non linear relationship between concentration and advertising in sutton s terms this is rationalised by pointing to the different opportunities and incentives for advertising under different market structures cable s analysis is based on various hypotheses concerning the magnitudes of the price and advertising demand elasticities and reactions under different market structures basically they both argue that it is difficult to internalise the benefits of advertising in low concentration industries and monopoly gives no incentive for competitive advertising in between oligopoly provides the structure most conducive to advertising as reviewed in a later section however the empirical evidence is somewhat conflicting some reject the hypothesis of a positive relationship but other evidence has confirmed the existence of a linear or inverted u shaped relation three main issues have been examined in these studies the existence and shape of the underlying relationship between concentration and advertising the influence of product and market characteristics and more recently the direction of causality the second though has probably been the source of most debate the issue has been that differences in product and market characteristics will ceteris paribus affect the amount of advertising carried out samples are then chosen and or variables included which attempt to account for these differences in particular researchers generally attempt to distinguish between consumer and non consumer goods samples it is argued in this paper that such apparently judicious selection of samples may be misguided and seriously affect the results the main reason is that even if it were possible to define a consumer good in principle in general firms as well

integrating agronomic principles into production function specification a dichotomy of growth inputs and facilitating inputs this article presents a general conceptual framework for integrating agronomic principles into economic production analysis we categorize inputs in crop production into growth inputs and facilitating inputs based on this dichotomy we specify an asymmetric production function the robustness of the asymmetric framework is tested using crop level panel data on potato production in the netherlands the test results do not reject the proposed framework and the asymmetric specification better represents the underlying production technology

cut throat fringe competition in an emerging country market tax evasion or the absence of market power brazil s established soft drink firms recently lost ground to multiple low price entrants with small scale operations and minimal advertising while incumbents attributed such undercutting to entrants lower costs from non compliance with the law generics counterargued that incumbents high prices stemmed from unilateral market power rather than cost heterogeneity by estimating a structural model i can single handedly explain established brands high prices through low equilibrium price elasticities of demand tax evasion in the fringe while plausible appears to be offset by higher procurement costs or less efficient scale more generally a competitive informal sector can alleviate the allocative distortions in certain concentrated industries

migration and labour markets in oecd countries a panel cointegration approach this article examines the interaction between immigration and the host labour market of 14 organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries using nonstationary panel data methodology we estimate a trivariate vector error correction model vecm and derive causality tests to simultaneously assess the long and short term macroeconomic impact of newcomers on wages and unemployment levels in the host country the results suggest that an increase of migrants is likely to increase wages in the destination countries in the short run but to increase them in the long run there is no evidence of adverse effects on unemployment due to immigration in short and long term except for anglo saxon countries in the short term our findings also show that immigration is conditioned by levels of unemployment and wages especially in anglo saxon countries

low and high skill migration flows free mobility versus other determinants we investigate what economic factors drive international migration of workers to france and how their influence varies across different skill levels under restrictive policies and through time as free mobility is implemented we find that neither incentives nor policy parameters are similar across skill levels migration drivers such as a network of compatriots and relative incomes influence the movement of low skill workers high skill individuals however move only according to financial opportunities be they standard of living or returns to skill within a class we conclude that competition for high skill workers among organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries requires more than free mobility to successfully attract high skill migrants even for a developed country such as france

isolating the network effect of immigrants on trade within the migration trade nexus literature this paper proposes a more carefully defined measure of migration business networks and quantifies its impact on bilateral trade using cross sectional data and controlling for the overall bilateral stock of migrants the share of migrants employed in managerial business related occupations has a strong additional effect on trade those immigrants should be the ones directly involved in the diffusion and transmission of information relevant for companies trading with other countries their presence is found to increase the volume of trade especially of imports beyond the already known effect of immigrants or highly educated immigrants when we control for the presence of highly educated immigrants the share of immigrants in business network occupations shows a particularly large effect on trade in differentiated goods we also find that highly educated individuals in business related occupations are those contributing to stimulate import and export by the largest margin business network effects seem particularly important in stimulating exports to culturally different countries such as those with different language and legal origin

effects of innovation on employment a dynamic panel analysis abstract this paper estimates the effect of innovation on employment at the firm level our uniquely long innovation panel data set of german manufacturing firms covers more than 20 years and allows us to use various innovation measures we can distinguish between product and process innovations as well as between innovation input and innovation output measures using dynamic panel gmm system estimation we find positive effects of innovation on employment this is true for innovation input as well as for innovation output variables innovations show their positive effect on employment with a time lag and process innovations have higher effects than product innovations

identifying earnings assimilation of immigrants under changing macroeconomic conditions failure to account for differences between immigrants and natives in their responsiveness to changes in macroeconomic conditions may bias estimates of assimilation effects on immigrant earnings using norwegian register data from 1980 to 1996 we first establish that earnings of immigrants from non oecd countries exhibit greater sensitivity to local unemployment than do earnings of natives the empirical analysis further reveals that standard methods of estimation which fail to consider differential immigrant and native responsiveness understate earnings growth and overstate cohort differentials among non oecd immigrants these biases are attributable to trends in macroeconomic conditions over the sample period

measuring productivity growth under factor non substitution an application to us steam electric power generation utilities a theoretical framework is developed for decomposing partial factor productivity and measuring technical inefficiency when the underlying technology is characterized by factor non substitution with farrell s 1957 radial index of technical inefficiency being inappropriate in this case russell non radial indices are adapted to measure technical inefficiency in a leontief type model a system of factor demand equations with a regime specific technical inefficiency term is proposed and estimated allowing for dependence across inputs using a copula approach then the paper presents a complete decomposition of partial factor productivity changes using a dataset of us steam power electric generation utilities

employment wages and the economic cycle differences between immigrants and natives in this paper we analyse differences in the cyclical pattern of employment and wages of immigrants and natives for two large immigrant receiving countries germany and the uk we show that despite large differences in their immigrant populations there are similar and significant differences in cyclical responses between immigrants and natives in both countries even conditional on education age and location we decompose changes in outcomes into a secular trend and a business cycle component we find significantly larger unemployment responses to economic shocks for low skilled workers relative to high skilled workers and for immigrants relative to natives within the same skill group there is little evidence for differential wage responses to economic shocks we offer three explanations for these findings an equilibrium search model where immigrants experience higher job separation rates a model of dual labour markets and differences in the complementarity of immigrants and natives to capital

a nonhomothetic generalized leontief cost function based on pooled data factor demand studies of komiya ozaki lau and tamura based upon detailed cross section data on individual production units have found that the nonhomothetic factor limitational nht fl demand system a nonhomothetic version of the leontief fixed coefficient model well explains the data these results however have mostly been ignored in the current literature on flexible functional forms and in fact none of the well known nonhomothetic flexible cost function forms includes the nht fl model i introduce a new nonhomothetic form of the generalized leontief gl cost function which includes the nht fl model as a special case empirical application to a pooled data set of the japanese iron steel industry indicates that his form is superior to the translog diewert wales gl and berndt khaled gl forms copyright 1990 by mit press

collusive equilibria in oligopolies with finite lives abstract it is generally accepted that collusive agreements cannot be sustained in oligopolies with finite lives in this paper it is shown that provided the number of competitors is neither too small nor too large the most restrictive output i e the monopoly output can be sustained as a perfect nash equilibrium if the number of firms is too small only sequences of the nash equilibria of the constituent market game can appear as perfect nash equilibria if the number of firms is too large the power of the cartel falls sharply

the global economic crisis and the effect of immigrant workers on native born employment in europe the debate regarding the economic effects of employing immigrants has attracted renewed interest in european countries since the economic crisis we provide an approximation of the labour market effects of immigrant workers in four european countries during the global economic crisis after briefly analysing native and foreign born worker conditions for the most recent period our analysis focuses on the correlation between the stock of immigrant workers and the number of native labour market workers across several segments of the labour market using a simple model approach using eurostat and lfs labour force survey data we estimate a structural dynamic model using the generalised method of moments gmm to examine adjustment dynamics in the labour market and labour market segment and worker educational levels countries of origin and genders overall the empirical results suggest that immigrant labour force effects on native born worker employment rates have been persistent and but weak throughout the business cycle these effects are globally positive and immigrant origins do not appear to change the nature of their impact we offer some explanations for these findings related to dual labour markets and to differences in levels of substitution among native and immigrant workers

the labor market impact of immigration in western germany in the 1990 s in this article we estimate the wage and employment effects of recent immigration in western germany using administrative data for the period 1987 2001 and a labor market equilibrium model we find that the substantial immigration of the 1990s had very little adverse effects on native wages and on their employment levels instead it had a sizeable adverse employment effect on previous immigrants as well as a small adverse effect on their wages these asymmetric results are partly driven by a higher degree of substitution between old and new immigrants in the labor market and in part by the rigidity of wages in less than flexible labor markets in a simple counter factual experiment we show that in a world of perfect wage flexibility and no unemployment insurance the wage bill loss of old immigrants would be much smaller

an empirical analysis of dynamic nonprice competition in an oligopolistic industry this article develops a dynamic model of nonprice competition in an oligopolistic industry and uses it to analyze advertising competition in the u s cigarette industry the model generalizes existing studies by allowing advertising to affect both firm market shares and the total size of the market the model also allows dynamic conjectural variations to arise from the intertemporal links created by the durability of advertising we use these dynamic conjectural variations to distinguish alternative models of competitive interaction we estimate the complete model of firm production demand and advertising choice by using data for u s cigarette producers the results indicate that firm advertising primarily affects the level of market demand with a firm s effect on rival firms market shares arising through variations in the number of brands sold empirical results on firm behavior suggest that firms act as if their advertising choices will alter the future advertising choices of rival firms in both the high tar and low tar cigarette markets

mexican immigrant employment outcomes over the business cycle the united states is beginning to emerge from the deepest downturn the country has experienced since the great depression as of october 2009 the number of unemployed persons had risen by 8 2 million since the great recession began in december 2007 all demographic groups have experienced job losses but some groups have been more adversely affected than others repeating the pattern of most previous downturns the recession s impact has been worst for low education and minority workers one group that has been particularly hard hit is mexican immigrants data from the current population survey indicate that between the first quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2009 the unemployment rate among mexican immigrants rose from 4 2 percent to 11 3 percent and their employment rate dropped by 5 percentage points in contrast during that period the unemployment rate among non hispanic white natives rose from 3 7 percent to 7 8 percent and their employment rate fell by 2 6 percentage points mexican immigrants tend to be particularly vulnerable to economic downturns because of their relatively low skill levels they make up one fourth of all workers who do not have a high school diploma or equivalent and over one half of workers who have completed at most eighth grade when the economy slows employers look to shed their least productive employees first employers tend to invest less in training low skilled workers and therefore have less

precautionary saving credit constraints and irreversible investment theory and evidence from serniarid india this article investigates the extent to which poor households are discouraged from making a non divisible but profitable investment using data on irrigation wells in india we estimate the parameters of a structural model of irreversible investment results show that poor farmers fail to undertake a profitable investment that they could in principle self finance because the nondivisibility of the investment puts it out of their reach irreversibility constitutes an additional disincentive to invest simulations show that the availability of credit can dramatically increase investment in irrigation and that interest rate subsidization has little impact

regulation efficiency and granger causality abstract this paper examines whether financial performance granger causes productive efficiency improvements in current period financial performance provide firms with funds to initiate changes that can enhance future period efficiency and profits returns to equity and the rate base are used as measures of financial performance data envelopment analysis is used to compute regulated farrell measures of cost technical and allocative efficiency the data sample is a panel of 20 us interstate natural gas pipeline companies from 1977 to 1987 results indicate that improvements in financial performance productive efficiency did not statistically contribute to enhancing productive efficiency financial performance

the measurement of productive efficiency a reconsideration the purpose of this paper is to generalize the farrell indexes of productive efficiency to nonhomothetic production technologies and at the same time maintain the cost interpretation of the farrell measures since the generalized indexes rely heavily on recent developments in the estimation of frontier cost and production functions several frontier models are reviewed in addition to generalized indexes of technical allocative and overall productive efficiency a variety of single factor efficiency measures are discussed the applicability of the proposed efficiency measures is illustrated with a numerical example of electric power generation

semi radial technical efficiency measurement semi radial efficiency measurement combines technical efficiency as captured by the classical farrell measure with an economically meaningful mix efficiency component the semi radial evaluation we propose proceeds in two steps first we build on the price interpretation of the generally accepted koopmans efficiency notion to characterize appropriate benchmarks next we present both a quantity based distance measure and its dual price based equivalent to evaluate the mix efficiency factor the type of measures we propose may e g be used to provide a price rationale for the zieschang technical efficiency evaluation procedure

the determinants of the cost efficiency of electric generating plants a stochastic frontier approach this article provides a detailed analysis of generation plant operating cost efficiency over the period 1988 1997 i estimate a stochastic frontier cost function together with a model of plant inefficiencies to measure the operating efficiencies of individual plants and identify factors that are associated with variations in plant efficiencies i find evidence that plant efficiencies are associated with capacity utilization of the plant the number of plants under utility management and ownership form i also find that regulatory restructuring activity in certain states is associated with improvements in plant operating performance the purpose of this article is to provide a detailed analysis of the operating cost efficiencies of electricity generating plants over the period 1988 1997 i estimate the operating efficiencies of fossil fueled steam generating plants and examine factors that influence plant operating performance i use the estimation procedure of battese and coelli 1995 to simultaneously estimate a stochastic frontier cost function and a function relating plant efficiency levels to plant specific factors and other explanatory variables a comprehensive data set allows me to investigate the influence of capacity utilization ownership form and utility experience on plant efficiency levels since significant regulatory change in the electricity industry had begun during this time period i also investigate the impact of state level regulatory change on plant operating efficiency a number of authors have analyzed the efficiencies of electricity generating plants relative to a best practice frontier including kopp and smith 1980 schmidt and lovell 1979 stevenson 1980 cote 1989 reifschneider and stevenson 1991 hammond 1992 pollitt 1995 and fire grosskopf and logan 1983 1985 these studies find considerable evidence of inefficiency in electricity generation during the 1960s and 1970s the present study provides more recent information regarding generating plant efficiencies during a period of significant regulatory and structural change studies investigating the determinants of power plant departures from the frontier have focused primarily on the effects of ownership mode pollitt 1995 provides a comprehensive review of these studies reifschneider and stevenson 1991 examine the impact on cost efficiency of a number of variables including the capacity utilization of the firm s generating facilities more recently knittel 2001 examines the impact of incentive regulation on plant efficiency levels steiner

measuring international skilled migration a new database controlling for age of entry recent data on international migration of skilled workers define skilled migrants by education level without distinguishing whether they acquired their education in the home or the host country this article uses immigrants age of entry as a proxy for where they acquired their education data on age of entry are available from a subset of receiving countries that together represent 77 percent of total skilled immigration to countries of the oecd organization for economic co operation and development using these data and a simple gravity model to estimate the age of entry structure of the remaining 23 percent alternative brain drain measures are proposed that exclude immigrants who arrived before ages 12 18 and 22

revenue based capacity utilisation measures and decomposition the case of danish north sea trawlers in fisheries capacity analysis has largely been limited to measuring physical capacity defined as the maximum amount of output that can be produced per unit of time given existing plant and equipment and unrestricted availability of variable inputs an economic measure of capacity can be defined as the maximum revenue attainable for the given fixed inputs using relevant outputs and output prices this paper examines these two approaches to capacity by applying data envelopment analysis to physical and economic input output data for danish north sea trawlers the economic and physical measures are compared and contrasted using correlation analysis an innovative analysis into the composition of possible revenue increments is also presented and reasons for economic inefficiency of vessels are identified

measures of technical efficiency abstract fare and lovell j econom theory 19 1978 150 162 suggest four properties that a measure of technical efficiency should satisfy the commonly employed debreu farrell measure fails three of them necessary and sufficient conditions for a measure to satisfy the four conditions are provided and recently proposed measures are analyzed in the light of this result also it is argued that the debreu farrell measure has several desirable properties when one takes account of 1 perhaps unknown market prices and the relationship between technical and economic efficiency and 2 its characterization as a measure of economic efficiency using the shadow prices implicit in the production technology

the labour market impact of immigration in the first part of this paper we present a stylized model of the labour market impact of immigra tion we then discuss mechanisms through which an economy can adjust to immigration changes in factor prices output mix and production technology in the second part we explain the problems of empirically estimating how immigration affects labour market outcomes of the resident population and review some strategies to address these we then summarize some recent empirical studies for the uk and other countries we conclude with an outlook on what we believe are important avenues for future research

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

unraveling the productivity growth slowdown in the u s canada and japan the effects of subequilibrium scale economies and markup measures of productivity growth typically include in the productivity residual the impacts of fixity of factors subequilibrium costs of adjustment returns to scale and markups this paper proposes a general framework for adjusting the residual to accommodate these impacts by first correcting and then decomposing traditional measures use of the framework is illustrated empirically for the united states japanese and canadian manufacturing sectors using an econometric model that allows explicit incorporation and measurement of these factors the adjusted measures show that a significant amount of cyclical and secular change in measured productivity growth can be attributed to production characteristics other than technical change particularly scale effects copyright 1992 by mit press