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

emigration to south africa s mines this paper presents a simultaneous econometric model of both the determinants of international migration to the south african mines and of some of the economic consequences for each of the labor supplying countries not only are the short run effects of labor withdrawal on traditional crop cultivation and the domestic wage labor markets considered but also the long term effects of savings from mine earnings invested in crops and cattle in the home countries the experiences of botswana lesotho malawi mozambique and the south african homelands are compared it is shown that emigration to the south african mines has reduced crop production in the subsistence sectors of botswana lesotho malawi and the south african homelands in the short run but the results also suggest that earnings of migrants have enhanced both crop productivity and cattle accumulation in the longer run except in lesotho excerpt

migration and development research is moving far beyond remittances research on migration and development has recently changed in two ways first it has grown sharply in volume emerging as a proper subfield second while it once embraced principally rural urban migration and international remittances migration and development research has broadened to consider a range of international development processes these include human capital investment global diaspora networks circular or temporary migration and the transfer of technology and cultural norms for this special issue we present a selection of frontier migration and development research that instantiates these trends

emigration and welfare in an economy with foreign capital abstract this paper examines the effects of emigration on welfare of the remaining residents r in an economy producing traded t and non traded n goods with the aid of foreign and domestic capital while the existing literature has established that emigration reduces the welfare of those left behind when foreign capital is not present in the economy the analysis below suggests that with foreign capital the effect on welfare may well be reversed the paper also compares the welfare implications of remittance flows back to the source country when they are used to finance consumption and when they are used to finance capital accumulation

long term impacts of class size in compulsory school how does class size in compulsory school affect people s long run education and earnings we use maximum class size rules and norwegian administrative registries allowing us to observe outcomes up to age 48 we do not find any indication of beneficial effects of class size reduction in compulsory school for a one person reduction in class size we reject effects on income as small as 0 12 percent in primary school and 0 15 percent in middle school population differences in parental background school size or competitive pressure do not appear to reconcile our findings with previous studies

international migration remittances and welfare in a dependent economy abstract this note extends the work of rivera batiz 1982 in an attempt to examine the role of remittances in determining the effects of migration on the welfare of the remaining residents in a small open economy producing both traded and non traded goods it is shown that if the flow of remittances exceeds a certain critical amount the remaining residents benefit from migration even if they do not receive any of the remittances themselves this is in sharp contrast with the results of the rivera batiz model in which the possibility of a gain for the non migrants is ruled out

social capital and social quilts network patterns of favor exchange we examine the informal exchange of favors in societies such that any two individuals interact too infrequently to sustain exchange but such that the social pressure of the possible loss of multiple relationships can sustain exchange patterns of exchange that are locally enforceable and renegotiation proof necessitate that all links are supported any two individuals exchanging favors have a common friend in symmetric settings such robust networks are social quilts tree like unions of completely connected subnetworks examining favor exchange networks in 75 villages in rural india we find high levels of support and identify characteristics that correlate with support

how do investment ideas spread through social interaction evidence from a ponzi scheme a unique data set from a large ponzi scheme allows me to study word of mouth diffusion of investment information investors could join the scheme only by invitation from an existing member which allows me to observe how the idea spreads from one person to the next based on inviter invitee relationships i find that the observed social network has a scale free connectivity structure which significantly facilitates the diffusion of the investment idea and contributes to the growth and survival of the socially spreading ponzi scheme i further find that investors invest more if their inviter has comparatively higher age education and income

overshooting the savings target temporary migration investment in housing and development summary there are two seemingly competing branches of the literature on saving and duration of stay decisions of temporary migrants one relies on the target saving explanation and the other on utility maximization over a life cycle we attempt to reconcile the two approaches within a framework where a migrant has a well defined savings target in planning to purchase a new home at origin but also chooses the time of return and the consumption path to maximize lifetime utility our analysis highlights the role of property investment and savings repatriation in the relationship between temporary migration and development

intra school competition and student achievement within the economics of education literature numerous studies have investigated the relationship between educational market competition and educational achievement educational market competition has been defined as either the availability of vouchers within a community or the number of schools or school districts within the relevant market structure while these studies have shown that increases in inter district competition result in increased student achievement no studies to our knowledge have yet investigated the effect of intra school competition on student achievement within this study a measure of intra school competition is developed and the findings indicate that increased intra school competition leads to increased student achievement

a strategic model of social and economic networks we study the stability and efficiency of social and economic networks when self interested individuals can form or sever links first for two stylized models we characterize the stable and efficient networks there does not always exist a stable network that is efficient next we show that this tension persists generally to assure that there exists a stable network that is efficient one is forced to allocate resources to nodes that are not responsible for any of the production we characterize one such allocation rule the equal split rule and another rule that arises naturally from bargaining of the players

housing over time and over the life cycle a structural estimation we estimate a structural model of optimal life cycle housing and nonhousing con sumption in the presence of labor income and house price uncertainties the model postulates constant elasticity of substitution between housing service and nonhousing consumption and explicitly incorporates a housing adjustment cost our estimationts the cross sectional and time series household wealth and housing proles from the panel study of income dynamics 1984 to 2005 reasonably well and suggests an intratemporal elasticity of substitution between housing and nonhousing consumption of 0 487 the low elasticity estimate is largely driven by moments conditional on state house prices and moments in the latter half of the sample period and is robust to different assumptions of housing adjustment cost we then conduct policy analyses in which we let house price and income take values as those observed between 2006 and 2011 we show that the responses depend importantly on the housing adjustment cost and the elasticity of sub stitution between housing and nonhousing consumption in particular compared with the benchmark the impact of the shocks on homeownership rates is reduced but the impact on nonhousing consumption is magnied when the house selling cost is sizable or when housing service and nonhousing consumption are highly substitutable

public funding for startups in argentina an impact evaluation a broad literature has found that the misallocation of entrepreneurial talent has strong effects on productivity to investigate whether the government can improve entrepreneurial activity we analyze a policy aimed at promoting innovative startups through the provision of funding and technical assistance to potential entrepreneurs in buenos aires argentina we conduct a survey and use regression discontinuity methods to identify the effects of the policy we find significant effects on enterprise creation and survival as well as on employment overall we show that small scale public policy can help entrepreneurs overcome a wide variety of barriers to firm entry and improve the allocation of their entrepreneurial talent

quasi experimental estimates of the effect of class size on achievement in norway using a comprehensive norwegian administrative database we exploit independent quasi experimental methods to estimate the effect of class size on student achievement at the end of lower secondary school identification based on maximum class size rules and population variation and variations on these methods give very similar estimates we cannot reject that the class size effect is equal to zero and can rule out effects as small as 1 5 percent of a standard deviation for a one student change in class size during three consecutive years

financial factors in economic development financial factors have been assigned strategic importance in economic development but very different factors have been isolated in the respective experiences in asia unrepressed financial markets in mobilizing saving and allocating investment have been given prominence in latin america the central question is the role of inflationary finance the scope for deficits to enhance growth and increasingly the feedback from high and unstable inflation to poor economic performance this paper reviews and contrasts the two approaches and concludes that the strong claims for the benefits of financial liberalization are not supported by evidence financial factors are important but probably only when financial instability becomes a dominant force the scope for inflationary finance is small and the risks are larger than commonly accepted when hyperinflation takes over and foreign exchange crises disrupt the price system and shorten the economic horizon to a week or a month normal economic development is suspended moreover difficult to reverse capital flight puts savings outside the home economy attention should focus on these extreme cases and explore deeper the thresholds at which financial factors become dominant and the channels through which this occurs superior growth performance in this perspective may be more a reflection of adaptability than financial deepening this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

influencing the influencers a theory of strategic diffusion the growth of the internet and assorted technologies has made it possible to collect and process detailed information on social networks this article investigates how firms and governments can harness the power of social networks to promote their goals we show that the optimal use of social networks leads to higher sales and greater profits however an increase in the level and dispersion of social interaction can increase or decrease the optimal influence strategy and profits of the player depending on the content of the interaction optimal influence strategies will target individuals with low or high connections depending on the content of interaction finally the returns to investing in market research on social networks are greater in more unequal networks

greek membership and academic performance evidence from student level data abstractcompared to other inputs of the education production function less is known about the effect of social and non classroom choices this study examines whether joining fraternities and sororities improves academic performance in order to account for the self selection bias of greek membership i exploit plausibly exogenous cross class variation in greek student composition at the course instructor level my estimate shows that a 10 percentage point increase in greek student composition translates to a 0 02 standard deviation increase in course grade for greek students relative to non greek students i further find that this effect is driven largely by low achieving and middle achieving white greek members

word of mouth communication and percolation in social networks this paper develops a model of demand pricing and advertising in the presence of social learning via word of mouth communication between friends in the model consumers must receive information about a monopolist s product in order to consider purchasing it the presence of word of mouth is not sufficient for demand to be more elastic and prices to be lower compared to an informed population i derive the comparative static results of connectivity mean preserving spread of friendships and clustering of friends on prices the optimal targets for advertising are not generically the individuals with the most friends jel l12 l14 a fundamental issue for economists is understanding the process by which demand is formed through social learning by consumers this article develops a framework based on random graphs for understanding the ways social learning via

measuring investment in education historic debates about the measurement of capital are even more complicated in the case of education and human capital as extensive research demonstrates education resources are not consistently related to student performance in existing elementary and secondary schools this inefficiency in public schools implies that spending and resource measures do not accurately capture variations in school quality this finding then has clear implications for both education policy and economic research because school inputs are poor policy instruments an alternative policy focus that appears much more productive is performance incentives related to student achievement

cooperation through imitation and exclusion in networks we develop a simple model to study the coevolution of interaction structures and action choices in prisoners dilemma games agents are boundedly rational and choose both actions and interaction partners via payoff biased imitation the dynamics of imitation and exclusion yields polymorphic outcomes under a wide range of parameters whenever agents hold some information beyond their interaction neighbors defectors and cooperators always coexist in disconnected components otherwise polymorphic networks can emerge with a center of cooperators and a periphery of defectors any stochastically stable state has at most two disconnected components simulations confirm our analytical results and show that the share of cooperators increases with the speed at which the network evolves increases with the radius of interaction and decreases with the radius of information

meeting strangers and friends of friends how random are social networks we present a dynamic model of network formation where nodes find other nodes with whom to form links in two ways some are found uniformly at random while others are found by searching locally through the current structure of the network e g meeting friends of friends this combination of meeting processes results in a spectrum of features exhibited by large social networks including the presence of more high and low degree nodes than when links are formed independently at random having low distances between nodes in the network and having high clustering of links on a local level we fit the model to data from six networks and impute the relative ratio of random to network based meetings in link formation which turns out to vary dramatically across applications we show that as the random network based meeting ratio varies the resulting degree distributions can be ordered in the sense of stochastic dominance which allows us to infer how the formation process affects average utility in the network

peer effects and social networks in education this paper studies whether structural properties of friendship networks affect individual outcomes in education we first develop a model that shows that at the nash equilibrium the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to her katz bonacich centrality measure this measure takes into account both direct and indirect friends of each individual but puts less weight to her distant friends we then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed dataset of adolescent friendship networks we show that after controlling for observable individual characteristics and unobservable network specific factors the individual s position in a network as measured by her katz bonacich centrality is a key determinant of her level of activity a standard deviation increase in the katz bonacich centrality increases the pupil school performance by more than 7 percent of one standard deviation

temporary emigration and welfare the case of low skilled labor this article studies the implications of temporary emigration for the welfare of a source country the framework is one of general equilibrium where the economy s stocks of both capital and labor are endogenously determined by the saving and migration decisions of optimizing agents simulations of the model suggest that for realistic values of the parameters welfare of nonmigrants of the source country is maximized when the migrants are employed abroad for a period in the range of roughly 8 12 years the ideal duration is found to be an increasing function of the international wage differential migration costs and the degree to which the rights of migrants are protected in the host country

the old boy and girl network social network formation on university campuses this paper documents the structure and composition of social networks on university campuses and investigates the processes that lead to their formation using administrative data and information from facebook com we document the factors that are the strongest predictors of whether two students are friends race is strongly related to social ties even after controlling for a variety of measures of socioeconomic background ability and college activities we develop a model of the formation of social networks that decomposes the formation of social links into effects based upon the exogenous school environment and effects of endogenous choice arising from preferences for certain characteristics in one s friends we use student level data from an actual social network to calibrate the model we simulate the social network under alternative university policies aimed at reducing social segmentation we find that changes in the school environment that affect the likelihood that two students interact have only a limited potential to reduce the racial segmentation of the social network

remittance receipts and allocation a study of three african countries remittances may influence household expenditures poverty rates development and investments in the receiving country using world bank survey data from ethiopia uganda and kenya the influence of remitters and recipients characteristics on remittance amounts and allocation is examined effects of the remitter receiver characteristics on remittance amounts are generally similar between countries such similarities imply a potential similar effect of policies in these countries age household income frequency of communication family relations with remitter and country the recipient resided in influence remittance allocation recipients in ethiopia and uganda are more likely to allocate remittance towards savings than those in kenya

financial liberalization and adjustment the cases of chile and new zealand abstract this paper analyzes macrodynamic adjustments during financial liberalization in chile and new zealand during the adjustment to more open capital accounts in the late 1970s or mid 1980s both countries experienced a real exchange rate appreciation and a collapse of net exports while domestic interest rates slowly converged to international levels this paper develops and estimates a two sector dynamic model with current and time varying parameter techniques the domestic interest rate is relatively more responsive to shocks under imperfect capital mobility while the real exchange rate becomes more responsive under perfect mobility therefore capital account liberalization does not eliminate but rather shifts volatility from the domestic interest rate to the real exchange rate jel e65 f33

causal effects in education abstract in recent years a wave of new studies on the effects of educational interventions on student performance has emerged the realization that inputs in the education process are endogenous is important for the validity of traditional findings because of ignoring endogeneity bias all traditional estimates might be wrong recent studies exploit exogenous variation in interventions in education produced by controlled or natural experiments results generated by this methodological innovation differ substantially from the traditional findings this article reviews this new literature illustrates new methods for identifying causal effects of interventions in education and compares the findings with the traditional literature

a model of housing in the presence of adjustment costs a structural interpretation of habit persistence building on the model of sanford j grossman and guy laroque 1990 this paper provides a model of household consumption and portfolio allocation which incorporates the role of housing as both a consumption good and as a component of wealth the model captures the following features of the household s problem a utility depends probably nonseparably on two distinct goods nondurable consumption and housing b nondurable consumption can be adjusted cost lessly but housing is subject to an adjustment cost c households face housing price risk in the sense that the relative price of housing varies over time and d in addition to the house the household can invest in a wide variety of financial assets this single reasonably tractable model generates testable implications for portfolio allocation risk aversion asset pricing and the dynamics of nondurable consumption because the original grossman and laroque model considers a utility function in which the durable good is the sole argument and thus abstracts completely from nondurable consump tion their analysis cannot address either the potential spillover effects of the adjustment costs of the durable good on the dynamics of nondurable consumption or the implications for portfolio allocation of housing risk arising from variation in the relative price of housing in addition to generating implications for issues on which the original grossman and laroque model was silent the housing model delivers a strikingly different message concerning asset pricing that is in contrast to the grossman and laroque result that the consumption based capital asset pricing model consumption capm fails the housing model implies that the consumptioncapm holds we assume that the household incurs an adjustment cost when altering the holding of the dura ble good or house although financial assets can be bought and sold costlessly consumption of the nondurable good can also be adjusted costlessly when choosing a new house the consumer takes into account the fact that the consumption of housing services will be constant at the new level until the subsequent stopping time when it is again worthwhile to incur the adjustment cost thus the home purchase decision is endogenous and fully rational but because of the adjustment cost infrequent in this continuous time setting the household s decision process has a recursive structure at each instant the household first decides whether it is optimal to sell the house immediately on those rare occasions that it is optimal to incur the adjustment cost the household sells the old house and buys a new one instantaneously if the household decides that it is not optimal to sell the house immediately it then determines its optimal holdings of financial assets and optimal level of nondurable consumption conditional on the current housing stock in essence because of the adjustment costs associated with the durable good the current

a general equilibrium model of guest worker migration the source country perspective abstract this paper examines the problem of guest worker migration from an economy populated by identical utility maximizing individuals with finite working lives the decision to migrate the rate of saving while abroad as well as the length of a migrant s stay in the foreign country are all viewed as part of a solution to an intertemporal optimization problem in addition to studying the microeconomic aspects of temporary migration the paper analyses the determinants of the equilibrium flow of migrants the corresponding domestic wage and the level of welfare enjoyed by a typical worker effects of an emigration tax are also investigated

a better job thanks to personal networks an evaluation for migrants who arrived in france before age 18 it is more difficult for migrants than natives to find a job in their host country so many of them have to accept at least temporarily a job that is below their level of qualification this repr

asset pricing in large information networks we study asset pricing in economies with large information networks we focus on networks that are sparse and have power law degree distributions in line with empirical studies of large scale social networks our theoretical framework yields a rich set of novel asset pricing implications we derive closed form expressions for price volatility profitability and trading volume as functions of the network topology we also study agent welfare and show that the network that optimizes total welfare is typically a uniform one with an intermediate degree of connectedness

experimental estimates of education production functions this paper analyzes data on 11 600 students and their teachers who were randomly assigned to different size classes from kindergarten through third grade statistical methods are used to adjust for nonrandom attrition and transitions between classes the main conclusions are 1 on average performance on standardized tests increases by four percentile points the first year students attend small classes 2 the test score advantage of students in small classes expands by about one percentile point per year in subsequent years 3 teacher aides and measured teacher characteristics have little effect 4 class size has a larger effect for minority students and those on free lunch 5 hawthorne effects were unlikely

social closure surnames and crime this paper studies the effect of social closure on crime and tax evasion rates using disaggregated data for italian municipalities we propose an original and innovative measure of social closure based on the diversity of surname distribution which reflects a community s history of migration and inbreeding we find that all else equal communities with a history of social closure have lower crime rates and higher tax evasion rates than more open communities the effect of social closure is likely to be causal it is relevant in magnitude statistically significant and robust to changes in the set of included controls in the specific measures of dependent and independent variables in the specification of the regression equation and in the possible sample splits our findings are consistent with the idea that social closure strengthens social sanctions and social control thus leading to more cooperative outcomes in local interactions but it reduces cooperation on a larger scale

zipf s law for cities an explanation zipf s law is a very tight constraint on the class of admissible models of local growth it says that for most countries the size distribution of cities strikingly fits a power law the number of cities with populations greater than s is proportional to 1 s suppose that at least in the upper tail all cities follow some proportional growth process this appears to be verified empirically this automatically leads their distribution to converge to zipf s law

bayesian learning in social networks we study the perfect bayesian equilibrium of a sequential learning model over a general social network each individual receives a signal about the underlying state of the world observes the past actions of a stochastically generated neighbourhood of individuals and chooses one of two possible actions the stochastic process generating the neighbourhoods defines the network topology we characterize pure strategy equilibria for arbitrary stochastic and deterministic social networks and characterize the conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning convergence in probability to the right action as the social network becomes large we show that when private beliefs are unbounded meaning that the implied likelihood ratios are unbounded there will be asymptotic learning as long as there is some minimal amount of expansion in observations we also characterize conditions under which there will be asymptotic learning when private beliefs are bounded

frictional unemployment on labor flow networks abstract we develop an alternative theory to the aggregate matching function in which workers search for jobs through a network of firms the labor flow network the lack of an edge between two companies indicates the impossibility of labor flows between them due to high frictions in equilibrium firms hiring behavior correlates through the network generating highly disaggregated local unemployment hence aggregation depends on the topology of the network in non trivial ways this theory provides new micro foundations for the beveridge curve wage dispersion and the employer size premium we apply our model to employer employee matched records and find that network topologies with pareto distributed connections cause disproportionately large changes on aggregate unemployment under high labor supply elasticity

testing capital account liberalization without forward rates another look at chile 1979 1982 abstract the paper offers a way to test the impact of capital account liberalization on domestic interest rates when proxies for expectations of depreciation are unavailable the model is tested on the well understood japanese experience in 1979 1980 and then applied to the chilean liberalization from 1979 1982 the evidence points to chilean monetary authorities retaining significant control over interest rates across the period and offers support to an evolving interpretation of the period that stresses the excessive optimism about the reforms rather than their lack of credibility as the source of their ultimate collapse

imported inputs in an optimising model of a small open economy abstract this paper addresses two issues first a model of optimising behaviour in a small open economy is presented and analysed a solution is presented to the problem of inconsistency between the domestic discount rate and the world interest rate using rawl s criterion for economic justice the resulting model of a small open economy has sensible properties and resembles non optimising models used in open economy macroeconomics second the analysis is extended to allow for a single imported factor of production and the impacts of a rise in its world price are examined the long run effects are a loss of economic welfare a reduction in the domestic capital stock on plausible assumptions about hicks allen complementarity a possible appreciation of the exchange rate in the long run although a short run depreciation is also possible and an ambiguous effect on the stock of foreign equities owned by the small economy

class size education and wages we use micro data for england and wales to examine the effects of class size on the decision to stay on in full time schooling at 16 and on wages later in life we find that class size has a sizeable and significant effect on the decision to stay on this finding is very robust wage equations show the effect of staying on is significantly positive for wages combining this with the effect of class size on the staying on decision reveals that class size significantly affects future wages reduced form models lead to much less accurate and insignificant estimates

social spillovers in the classroom identification estimation and policy analysis i present a method to jointly estimate social spillovers in the classroom and the distributions of teacher and student effects this method is based on the covariance and higher order moments restrictions of the test scores requiring the random assignment of teachers and students to classrooms using the tennessee project star dataset i estimate sizeable spillovers in kindergarten classrooms and departures from normality of the teacher and student ability distributions the estimates also show that reducing class size has a positive effect on mean performance but it increases the inequality based on these estimates i perform several input neutral policy counterfactuals involving teachers and students assignment rules and changing the distribution of class sizes for the latter i derive an optimal class size distribution rule which increases mean test scores and reduces the overall variance

monopoly pricing and diffusion of social network goods abstract i present a model of dynamic pricing and diffusion of a network good sold by a monopolist in the model the network good is a subscription social network good this means that in each period each consumer has to pay a subscription price to use the good and the utility derived from subscribing to the good increases as more of her neighboring consumers subscribe consumers myopically optimize their subscription decisions and the monopolist chooses a sequence of subscription prices that maximizes his discounted sum of per period profits three main results emerge first i characterize a unique steady state of the monopoly market second i find that optimal sequences of subscription prices oscillate around the subscription price at the steady state third i analyze how changes in the monopolist s discount factor and the density of the social network affect the subscription price subscription rate and deadweight loss at the steady state

segregation in friendship networks we analyze a network formation model where agents belong to different communities both individual benefits and costs depend on direct as well as indirect connections benefits of an indirect connection decrease with distance in the network while the cost of a link depends on the type of agents involved two agents from the same community always face a low linking cost while the cost of forming a relationship between two agents from different communities diminishes with the rate of exposure of each of them to the other community we find that socialization among the same type of agent can be weak even if the cost of maintaining links within one s own type is very low our model also suggests that policies aimed at reducing segregation are socially desirable only if they reduce the within community cost differential by a sufficiently large amount

social networks and non market valuations this paper considers the role of social networks in the non market valuation of public goods in the model individuals derive utility both from their own direct enjoyment of the public good and from the enjoyment of those in their network we find that network structure almost always matters both for utility and for valuation the network increases aggregate valuation when it assigns higher importance that is stronger connections to individuals with higher private values for the public good the model provides a theoretical foundation for the idea of opinion leaders who have disproportionate influence over their communities specifically opinion leaders are individuals assigned high importance by the network and projects favored by opinion leaders tend to be favored by the network as a whole the model can also guide future empirical studies by enabling a more structural approach to non market valuation in a socially connected group

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

the optimal migration duration and activity choice after re migration if migrants return to their origin countries two questions arise which are of immediate economic interest for both immigration and emigration country what determines their optimal migration duration and what are the activities migrants choose after a return little research has been devoted to these two issues this paper utilises a unique survey data set which records activities of returned migrants we first illustrate the activities of immigrants after returning we show that more than half of the returning migrants are economically active after return and most of them engage in entrepreneurial activities we then develop a model where migrants decide simultaneously about the optimal migration duration and their after return activities guided by this model we specify and estimate an empirical model where the after return activity and the optimal migration duration are simultaneously chosen

monetarism in chile 1973 1983 some economic puzzles the most recent of these experiments began in 1973 after the military overthrew president salvador allende in the 10 years following the coup the military implemented deep reforms directed toward transforming chile from an economy semi isolated from the rest of the world with strong governmental intervention into a liberalized worldintegrated economy where market forces were freely left to guide most of the economy s decisions these liberalization reforms were carried out at the same time that a major stabilization program aimed at reducing a 600 rate of inflation was being implemented many of the policies undertaken roughly correspond to what a vast number of economists have been advocating for developing countries trade was liberalized the capital account was partially opened interest rates were freed and an active domestic capital market was developed the fiscal system was reformed with a value added tax replacing a cascading sales tax the social security system was reformed and the private sector began to play a more active role in the growth and development

the international allocation of savings with quadratic transaction or risk costs abstract quadratic transaction costs are used to explain to what extent the savings of a country are invested in the same country and to what extent they give rise to international capital flows more specifically it is shown that the high across countries correlation between saving and investment observed by feldstein and horioka could at least in part result from differences in transaction costs between internal and external investments this remains true even in the presence of an international asset without such differences in the particular model used transaction costs cannot be distinguished from risk jel f21

the rise and fall of small worlds exploring the dynamics of social structure this paper explores the interplay between social structure and economic action by examining some of the evolutionary dynamics of an emergent network that coalesces into a small world system the study highlights the small world system s evolutionary dynamics at both the macro level of the network and the micro level of an individual actor this dual analytical lens helps establish that in competitive and information intensive settings a small world system could be a highly dynamic structure that follows an inverted u shaped evolutionary pattern wherein an increase in the small worldliness of the system is followed by its later decline as a result of three factors 1 the recursive relationship between the evolving social structure and individual actors formation of bridging ties which eventually homogenizes the information space and decreases actors propensity to form bridging ties creating a globally separated network 2 self containment of the small world network or increasing homogenization of the social system which makes the small world less accepting of and less attractive to new actors thereby limiting formation of bridging ties to outside clusters and 3 fragmentation of the small world network or the small world system s inability to retain current clusters the study uses data on interorganizational tie formation in the global computer industry in the period from 1996 to 2005 to test the hypothesized relationships

does the size of the legislature affect the size of government evidence from two natural experiments this paper makes use of regression discontinuity designs to estimate the effect of the number of legislators on the size of government the results indicate a negative effect i e the larger the size of the legislature the smaller is the size of government this runs counter to conventional wisdom one potential explanation is that more legislators can better control a budget maximizing bureaucracy i present evidence that is consistent with the proposed mechanism

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

network structure and the aggregation of information theory and evidence from indonesia abstract we use unique data from over 600 indonesian communities on what individuals know about the poverty status of others to study how network structure influences information aggregation we develop a model of semi bayesian learning on networks which we structurally estimate using within village data the model generates qualitative predictions about how cross village patterns of learning relate to network structure which we show are borne out in the data we apply our findings to a community based targeting program where citizens chose households to receive aid and show that the networks that the model predicts to be more diffusive differentially benefit from community targeting jel d14 d83 d85 i32 o12 z13

immigrating to opportunity estimating the effect of school quality using a natural experiment on ethiopians in israel in may 1991 fifteen thousand ethiopian jews were brought to israel in an overnight airlift and sorted in a haphazard and essentially random fashion to absorption centers across the country this quasi random assignment produced a natural experiment whereby the initial schooling environment of ethiopian children can be considered exogenous to their family background and parental decisions we examine the extent to which the initial elementary school environment affected the high school outcomes of ethiopian children using administrative panel data on the educational career of each child in israel through much of the 1990s the results show that the early schooling environment has an important effect on high school dropout rates repetition rates and the passing rate on matriculation exams necessary to enter college the results are robust to using alternative measures of the schooling environment and to the inclusion of community fixed effects which suggests that aspects of the elementary school itself are important for high school success

the formation of migrant networks in this paper we provide the first direct evidence on the internal structure of the migrant social network by using a purposely designed survey on sri lankan immigrants living in milan we show that the pattern of within group link formation is heterogeneous across immigrants and differentiated according to the network function i e accommodation credit job finding we find that migrants tend to interact with co nationals who come from nearby localities at origin while the time of arrival has a u shaped effect once the link is formed material support is provided mainly to relatives while early migrant fellows are helpful for job finding abstract from author

social connectivity media bias and correlation neglect we propose a model of political persuasion in which a biased newspaper aims to convince voters to vote for the government each voter receives the newspaper s report as well as an independent private signal voters then exchange this information on social media and form posterior beliefs neglecting correlation among signals an increase in connectivity increases the newspaper s bias if voters are ex ante predisposed to vote against the government and reduces the bias if they are predisposed in favour of the government while more precise independent signals reduce the newspaper s optimal bias the bias remains positive even when connectivity becomes large thus even with a large number of social connections the election produces an inefficient outcome with positive probability implying a failure of the condorcet jury theorem

does additional spending help urban schools an evaluation using boundary discontinuities this study exploits spatial anomalies in school funding policy in england to provide new evidence on the impact of resources on student achievement in urban areas anomalies arise because the funding allocated to local education authorities lea depends through a funding formula on the additional educational needs of its population and prices in the district however the money each school receives from its lea is not necessarily related to the school s own specific local conditions and constraints this implies that neighbouring schools with similar intakes operating in the same labour market facing similar prices but in different leas can receive very different incomes we find that these funding disparities give rise to sizeable differences in pupil attainment in national tests at the end of primary school showing that school resources have an important role to play in improving educational attainment especially for lower socio economic groups the design is geographical boundary discontinuity design which compares neighbouring schools matched on a proxy for additional educational needs of its students free school meal entitlement fsm in adjacent districts the key identification requirement is one of conditional ignorability of the level of lea grant where conditioning is on geographical location of schools and their proportion of fsm children

the effects of class size on student achievement new evidence from population variation abstract i identify the effects of class size on student achievement using longitudinal variation in the population associated with each grade in 649 elementary schools i use variation in class size driven by idiosyncratic variation in the population i also use discrete jumps in class size that occur when a small change in enrollment triggers a maximum or minimum class size rule the estimates indicate that class size does not have a statistically significant effect on student achievement i rule out even modest effects 2 to 4 percent of a standard deviation in scores for a 10 percent reduction in class size

reprint of migration and development research is moving far beyond remittances summary research on migration and development has recently changed in two ways first it has grown sharply in volume emerging as a proper subfield second while it once embraced principally rural urban migration and international remittances migration and development research has broadened to consider a range of international development processes these include human capital investment global diaspora networks circular or temporary migration and the transfer of technology and cultural norms for this special issue we present a selection of frontier migration and development research that instantiates these trends

community size and network closure large community size is often negatively correlated with prosocial behaviors such as formal volunteering working on public projects and informal help to friends and strangers robert d putnam 2000 119 206 this may be because people who reside in large communities simply spend less time socializing with each other as a result people living in large cities have on average fewer friends and their social networks support less cooperation a complementary channel which has received less attention in the literature is that community size may affect outcomes by changing other aspects of the network structure specifically even holding fixed the number of friends we expect social networks in small communities to exhibit greater network closure i e be more interconnected the intuition is straightforward in small communities the pool of potential friends is limited which increases the extent to which the network neighborhoods of two friends are likely to overlap james s coleman 1990 suggested that variation in network closure can affect outcomes in particular he argued that networks with higher closure generate high trust between friends which facilitates cooperation and improves welfare the logic is that networks with high closure allow for greater social sanctions between

using maimonides rule to estimate the effect of class size on scholastic achievement the twelfth century rabbinic scholar maimonides proposed a maximum class size of 40 this same maximum induces a nonlinear and nonmonotonic relationship between grade enrollment and class size in israeli public schools today maimonides rule of 40 is used here to construct instrumental variables estimates of effects of class size on test scores the resulting identiecation strategy can be viewed as an application of donald campbell s regression discontinuity design to the class size question the estimates show that reducing class size induces a signiecant and substantial increase in test scores for fourth and efth graders although not for third graders when asked about their views on class size in surveys parents and teachers generally report that they prefer smaller classes this may be because those involved with teaching believe that smaller classes promote student learning or simply because smaller classes offer a more pleasant environment for the pupils and teachers who are in them mueller chase and walden 1988 social scientists and school administrators also have a longstanding interest in the class size question class size is often thought to be easier to manipulate than other school inputs and it is a variable at the heart of policy debates on school quality and the allocation of school resources in many countries see e g robinson 1990 for the united states ofsted 1995 for the united kingdom and moshel ravid 1995 for israel this broad interest in the consequences of changing class size

how urban segregation distorts chinese migrants consumption summary this paper provides a new explanation for china s low consumption to gdp ratio by highlighting the constraints of the household registration system hukou on china s household consumption our baseline results show that the consumption of migrants is 16 20 lower than that of local urban residents we further find evidence suggesting that caused by hukou restrictions migrants save more for precautionary purposes have lower expectation of permanent income and consume much less durable goods because of high mobility moreover we have found no evidence that the consumption heterogeneity can be explained by migration effects culture or other forms of household heterogeneity as both the number and income level of migrants are rising quickly the constraining effects of hukou on household consumption is increasing 2014 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

gibrat s law for all cities two empirical regularities concerning the size distribution of cities have repeatedly been established zipf s law holds the upper tail is pareto and city growth is proportionate census 2000 data are used covering the entire size distribution not just the upper tail the nontruncated distribution is shown to be lognormal rather than pareto this provides a simple justification for the coexistence of proportionate growth and the resulting lognormal distribution an equilibrium theory of local externalities that can explain the empirical size distribution of cities is proposed the driving force is a random productivity process of local economies and the perfect mobility of workers

the economic uses and impact of international remittances in rural egypt international remittances refer to money and goods that are transmitted to households back home by people working away from their origin communities from the standpoint of economic development the central question regarding such resource transfers is quite straightforward namely how are such monies used do migrant workers channel international remittances into productive investments in their home communities or do they use such monies merely to underwrite the consumption of newly desired consumer goods stated more baldly do remittances from abroad help provide the investment needed to facilitate development or do they merely foster new patterns of dependence on status oriented consumer goods for migrant workers and their families in the past many observers have taken a dim view of the economic impact of international remittances primarily because they believe that the bulk of such monies is spent on personal consumption in his review article m lipton for example maintains that everyday consumption needs often absorb 90 or more of a village s remittances and that investment is only the fourth and last priority for remittances similarly shahid perwaiz in his analysis of remittances in pakistan writes that most such earnings are frittered away in personal consumption social ceremonies real estate and price escalating trading 2 other country level studies in egypt turkey and yemen have lamented both the low levels of international remittance earnings that go into investment and the large amounts of such earnings that are spent on consumer durables housing and land 3 in more recent years several empirical studies have appeared to refine these rather pessimistic conclusions i gilani et al found that pakistani workers did indeed use remittances from abroad to increase consumption one third of the migrant households reported increased

social networks and the identification of peer effects there is a large and growing literature on peer effects in economics in the current article we focus on a manski type linear in means model that has proved to be popular in empirical work we critically examine some aspects of the statistical model that may be restrictive in empirical analyses specifically we focus on three aspects first we examine the endogeneity of the network or peer groups second we investigate simultaneously alternative definitions of links and the possibility of peer effects arising through multiple networks third we highlight the representation of the traditional linear in means model as an autoregressive model and contrast it with an alternative moving average model where the correlation between unconnected individuals who are indirectly connected is limited using data on friendship networks from the add health dataset we illustrate the empirical relevance of these ideas

the law of the few the law of the few refers to the following empirical phenomenon in social groups a very small subset of individuals invests in collecting information while the rest of the group invests in forming connections with this select few in many instances there are no observable dierences in characteristics between those who invest in information and those who invest in forming connections this paper shows that the law of few naturally emerges in environments with identical rational agents we develop a strategic game in which players have the opportunity to invest in collecting information as well as in investing in bilateral connections with others we find that every strict equilibrium of this game exhibits the law of the few we also show that this pattern of social dierentiations is ecient in some cases

money the rate of devaluation and interest rates in a semi open economy colombia 1968 1982 most empirical studies on interest rate behavior have made extreme assumptions regarding the degree of openness of the economy under consideration generally it has been assumed that the economy in question is either completely closed to the rest of the world or that it is fully open and that there are no controls to capital movements in reality however most cases and especially those of developing countries correspond to an intermediate situation where the capital account of the balance of payments is partially open and there exist some controls to capital movements under these circumstances it would be expected that in the short run the domestic rate of interest will respond both to external factors i e world interest rates and to internal monetary conditions i e excess supply or demand for money the purpose of this paper is to develop an empirical model to analyze the behavior of nominal interest rates in a small semiopen economy the model specifically considers the role of open economy factors world rate of interet and expected rate of devaluation for example and the role of more traditional domestic monetary conditions in explaining interest rate behavior

random walk to innovation why productivity follows a power law abstract this paper examines a search model in which knowledge is created as rational but poorly informed innovators obtain new ideas from combinations of existing ideas we assume that the productivity of an idea is stochastic and depends on the productivity of the parental ideas importantly we assume that the contribution of these parents to the productivity of the final idea is enhanced by prior use of these in knowledge creation we identify conditions on the search costs leading to two properties 1 the tail of the distribution of the productivity of innovations is a power law and 2 the number of citations i e times an idea is used in the process of innovation follows a displaced power law both these properties are consistent with the available empirical evidence on the productivity of innovations and on patent citations

economics an emerging small world we study the evolution of social distance among economists over the period 1970 2000 while the number of economists has more than doubled the distance between them which was already small has declined significantly the key to understanding the short average distances is the observation that economics is spanned by a collection of interlinked stars a star is an economist who writes with many other economists most of whom have few coauthors and generally do not write with each other

the economic consequences of social network structure we survey the literature on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks we develop a taxonomy of macro and micro characteristics of social interaction networks and discuss both the theoretical and empirical findings concerning the role of those characteristics in determining learning diffusion decisions and resulting behaviors we also discuss the challenges of accounting for the endogeneity of networks in assessing the relationship between the patterns of interactions and behaviors

migration networks and microenterprises in mexico are migration networks associated with lower capital costs or the alleviation of capital constraints we examine these questions with data measuring access to remittance flows among small scale entrepreneurs in mexico using a survey of more than 6000 self employed workers and small firm owners located in 44 urban areas of mexico we estimate the impact of attachment to migration networks on the level of capital investment the capital output ratio sales and profits of microenterprises the impact is identified from the geographic pattern of migration from mexico driven by the completion of rail lines in the early 1900s for the full sample of firms we find that migration is associated with higher investment levels and higher profits but not higher sales the strongest effects on investment are in the categories of automobiles tools and inventories when the sample is limited to firms in high capital sectors investment sales and profits all increase with attachment to the migration networks suggesting that attachment to the migration network alleviates capital constraints in those sectors

public schooling college subsidies and growth abstract how does the mix of public education expenditures across primary and secondary k 12 education and post secondary college education influence economic growth to address this i build an overlapping generations endogenous growth model human capital is accumulated through compulsory k 12 education and through optional college education government uses tax revenue to provide quality in k 12 schooling and to subsidize college tuition when total expenditures are small all funds should provide k 12 quality when expenditures are above a critical value a positive share should subsidize tuition the share should increase with total expenditures and with the degree of complementarity of human capital accumulated through the two types of education also increased education spending is more likely to increase growth when a larger share subsidizes tuition

why do migrants return to poor countries evidence from philippine migrants responses to exchange rate shocks abstract this paper distinguishes between target earnings and life cycle motivations for return migration by examining how philippine migrants return decisions respond to major unexpected exchange rate changes in their overseas locations due to the asian financial crisis overall the evidence favors the life cycle explanation more favorable exchange rate shocks lead to fewer migrant returns a10 improvement in the exchange rate reduces the 12 month return rate by 1 4 percentage points however some migrants appear motivated by target earnings considerations in households with intermediate foreign earnings favorable exchange rate shocks have the least effect on return migration but lead to increases in household investment

some essentials of a workable guest worker program a guest worker program provides an appealing way of addressing labor shortages in an advanced country it requires however that foreign workers are willing to return home when their work permit expires i examine how immigration policies enforcement measures and opportunities available in various markets at home and abroad affect the behavior of program participants welfare of a migrant who obeys the rules of the program is compared with that of workers who choose other options in order to define the conditions under which temporary migration is attractive to potential migrants and at the same time consistent with voluntary return

the influences of financial and non financial factors on energy saving behaviour a field experiment in japan abstract this study examines the influences of financial and non financial factors on electricity conservation behaviour a random sample of 236 japanese households participated in the field experiment and the participants were offered two interventions such as monetary rewards depending on their reduction in electricity consumption and comparative feedback the average saving rates of the i reward intervention group 5 9 and the ii reward with comparative feedback group 8 2 are statistically larger than those of the iii control group 1 7 our study demonstrates the following first our econometric analysis confirmed a significant response by households to financial incentives but a more inconclusive response to the treatment that provided non financial additional information second we found a positive influence of treatment externalities across time and households on energy saving third there is a heterogeneous treatment effect in the reward intervention group with the households having a high new ecological paradigm nep score being more likely to respond to the reward programme and save electricity than those that do not finally and most interestingly differences in responses to the questionnaire before and after the experiment suggest that the participants had underestimated the marginal costs of saving electricity before they actually started to do so

school characteristics and teacher turnover assessing the role of preferences and opportunities job characteristics can affect worker turnover through their effect on utility and through their effect on outside job opportunities the aim of this study is to identify and estimate the roles of these two channels separately our method exploits information on job changes and relies on an augmented sample selection correction to illustrate our approach we use an exhaustive register of dutch primary school teachers and show a detailed picture of preferences for school characteristics we also find that the dependence between current and outside job attributes can affect turnover and thus the allocation of teachers across schools

reforms and macroeconomic adjustments in chile during 1974 1984 abstract this paper provides a background on the main macroeconomic developments of the reform period after a review of the macroeconomic disequilibrium before the reforms the paper interprets the macroadjustments the interpretation covers two distinct periods 1973 1976 when policy was based on a closed economy view and 1977 1982 when macropolicy was increasingly guided by an open economy model the paper argues that the setback that chile suffered during 1982 1983 and the large external debt that was accumulated were the result of two major errors the first was the use of the exchange rate to stabilize prices without due regard for the incentives for large capital inflows that arose from this policy at a time when international capital markets were very liquid the second major error was in the second half of 1981 after a large drop in capital inflows the authorities relied on an automatic adjustment mechanism by which the monetary squeeze from the reduction in capital inflows would improve the real exchange rate because wages were indexed to prior inflation the adjustment mechanism was bound to create substantial unemployment as indeed was the case the paper concludes with the assessment that most of the micro reforms were in the right direction and had the expected result and the errors were mostly in the design of macroeconomic policies

investment opportunities in the source country and temporary migration this paper examines how attractive investment opportunities available to temporary migrants in their country of origin aect their saving behavior and the optimal duration of stay abroad the model predicts an inverse u shaped relationship between migration duration and the expected rate of return on repatriated savings a higher rate provides an incentive to go back earlier and consume less abroad while it can also trigger emigration aimed at generating the savings required for investment after return at a more general level the paper illustrates how the behavior of temporary migrants re ects the interaction between their preferences and the opportunities available in the labor and capital markets of both countries

pricing and referrals in diffusion on networks abstract when a new product or technology is introduced potential consumers can learn its quality by trying it at a risk or by letting others try it and free riding on the information that they generate we propose a dynamic game to study the adoption of technologies of uncertain value when agents are connected by a network and a monopolist seller chooses a profit maximizing policy consumers with low degree few friends have incentives to adopt early while consumers with high degree have incentives to free ride the seller can induce high degree consumers to adopt early by offering referral incentives rewards to early adopters whose friends buy in the second period referral incentives thus lead to a double threshold strategy by which low and high degree agents adopt the product early while middle degree agents wait we show that referral incentives are optimal on certain networks while inter temporal price discrimination is optimal on others

growing stars a laboratory analysis of network formation abstract efficient information dispersion occurs with star networks where small numbers of agents gather information for distribution to larger groups previous studies have shown that ex ante heterogeneity in payoff incentives among agents is sufficient for reliable star formation goeree et al 2009 using laboratory experiments we show stars reliably emerge among ex ante homogeneous agents under specific institutional environments our results help to explain why star networks emerge frequently among homogeneous groups particularly rural farming communities conley and udry 2010 our findings have implications for developing countries where it is crucial to create mechanisms to promote efficient information sharing

consumption risk sharing in social networks we develop a model of informal risk sharing in social networks where relationships between individuals can be used as social collateral to enforce insurance payments we characterize incentive compatible risk sharing arrangements and obtain two results 1 the degree of informal insurance is governed by the expansiveness of the network measured by the number of connections that groups of agents have with the rest of the community relative to group size twodimensional networks where people have connections in multiple directions are su ciently expansive to allow very good risk sharing we show that social networks in peruvian villages satisfy this dimensionality property thus our model can explain townsend s 1994 puzzling observation that village communities often exhibit close to full insurance 2 in second best arrangements agents organize in endogenous risk sharing islands in the network where shocks are shared fully within but imperfectly across islands as a result network based risk sharing is local socially closer agents insure each other more

return migration and the survival of entrepreneurial activities in egypt summary the literature shows that temporary international migrants have a high propensity to opt for an entrepreneurial activity upon return but the prospects of survival of these activities have not been explored we address this research question using longitudinal egyptian data we find that entrepreneurs migration experience significantly improves the chances of survival of their entrepreneurial activities adopting econometric techniques that control for return migrants nonrandom selection in unobservables we resort to a bivariate probit model and a two stage residual inclusion estimator using the rate of population growth and the real oil price as alternative instruments for migration