remittances from international migration a comparison of el salvador and nicaragua i use household data from el salvador and nicaragua to examine the determinants of remittances from international migration nearly twice as many households in san salvador the capital of el salvador receive remittances from relatives abroad than do households in managua the capital of nicaragua and of those who receive remittances the average remittances received in san salvador is over double that in managua 119 month to 45 month the difference is explained by differences in the behavioral coefficients and by differences in the self selection bias of those who remit out of the pool of emigrants between the two countries excerpt

what drives health care expenditure baumol s model of unbalanced growth revisited the share of health care expenditure in gdp rises rapidly in virtually all oecd countries causing increasing concern among politicians and the general public yet economists have to date failed to reach an agreement on what the main determinants of this development are this paper revisits baumol s baumol w j 1967 macroeconomics of unbalanced growth the anatomy of urban crisis american economic review 57 3 415 426 model of unbalanced growth showing that the latter offers a ready explanation for the observed inexorable rise in health care expenditure the main implication of baumol s model in this context is that health care expenditure is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth this hypothesis is tested empirically using data from a panel of 19 oecd countries our tests yield robust evidence in favor of baumol s theory

identifying barriers toward a post growth economy a political economy view abstract in this paper we take a political economy perspective on barriers that inhibit a transition beyond the growth paradigm that is we frame transition barriers as looming conflicts of interest specifically we investigate potential transition barriers within three case studies first unemployment represents the most commonly cited reason why economic growth is considered indispensable second alternative indicators to gross domestic product gdp have not succeeded in replacing gdp as a standard metric of economic welfare third pension schemes rely on economic growth to offset demographic change in each of these three examples we identify actor interest constellations that foster the status quo of a growth economy we conclude that compensating some of those actors who would presumably be worse off in a post growth economy may be necessary though not sufficient for a transition

on stationarity and cointegration of international health expenditure and gdp this paper examines stationarity and cointegration of health expenditure and gdp for a sample of 21 oecd countries using data for the period 1960 1997 by applying a test battery that allows robust inference to be made on the stationarity and cointegration issue trend stationarity and no cointegration are tested using new country by country and panel tests not previously applied in this setting new results for country by country and panel tests of non stationarity and cointegration are presented our unit root and trend stationarity results indicate that both health expenditure and gdp are non stationary the no cointegration and cointegration results indicate that health expenditure and gdp are cointegrated

disease or utopia testing baumol in education baumol s cost disease offers a compelling hypothesis of rising unit costs in stagnant sectors but increased productivity in progressive sectors may generate the same prediction through income effects we examine quantity rather than expenditure data from the u s educational sector to distinguish between these explanations our results indicate significant negative impacts of manufacturing productivity on teacher pupil ratios

can baumol s model of unbalanced growth contribute to explaining the secular rise in health care expenditure an alternative test in a recent paper i argued that baumol s model of unbalanced growth offers a ready explanation for the observed secular rise in health care expenditure hce in rich countries baumol s model implies that hce is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth i tested this hypothesis empirically using data from a panel of 19 organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries and found robust evidence in favour of baumol s theory an alternative way to test baumol s theory is to check whether its implication that variations in the relative price of medical care contribute significantly to explaining variations in health expenditure in the same direction has an empirical grounding earlier studies although mostly not in an explicit attempt to test baumol s theory have occasionally rejected this hypothesis despite poor data quality of the available medical price indices i perform the alternative test using data for nine oecd countries my findings suggest that the relat

health care expenditures and gdp panel data unit root test results abstract this short paper presents unit root test results for time series on per capita national health care expenditures and gross domestic product in the oecd unlike the country by country test used by hansen p king a 1996 the determinants of health care expenditure a cointegration approach j health econ 15 127 137 the test we employ exploits the panel nature of the oecd data using this approach we are able to reject the null hypothesis that these series contain unit roots no single test is likely to be definitive in this rapidly evolving area of econometric research however our results help to mitigate concern that panel data analyses of national health care expenditures are misspecified

health care expenditure and gdp are they broken stationary in this paper we analyse the stationarity of the real per capita health care expenditure hce and real per capita gdp for a sample of oecd countries allowing for the presence of multiple structural breaks one novelty of the paper is that it permits the presence of structural breaks that affect both the level and the slope of the time series after the cross section dependence is accounted for we have found that these variables can be characterised as stationary processes evolving around a broken trend

population aging in healthcare a minor issue evidence from switzerland our study shows that population aging substantially affects healthcare expenditure hce this conclusion supports the popular but recently strongly contested view that the coming population aging will threaten the fiscal sustainability of health systems we contribute to this debate first by estimating the determinants of swiss healthcare expenditure hce with outlier robust dynamic regressions and second by projecting swiss hce based on the estimates produced and new population scenarios medical advances and gdp per capita also play a decisive role governments can mitigate hce growth by improving the health status of the population and by stimulating cost effective and productive medical advances

motivations to remit evidence from botswana in this article a theory of motivations to send remittances is described and tested with data from botswana altruism is one of the motivations tested and found to be an insufficient explanation for remittances among migrants in botswana a refinement of the model stipulates a modified altruism or enlightened self interest in this model the relationship between the migrant and family is tempered by an implicit understanding of mutual benefit the household strategy may be to encourage some members to migrate as a means of spreading risk and sharing gains the household strategy is similar to an insurance policy where migration is to places where market potential is high the risks incurred might be high the example is given of migration during a drought in botswana migrant remittances were greater in households with more cattle or households with more to lose drought alone was not statistically related to remittances increases in remittances were related to increased levels of education it is suggested that repayment was the motive for parents investment in migrants education migrants gains are identified as the potential for an inheritance the security of channeling investments through a trusted family member and security in having a home to return to it is pointed out that the altruism and family remittances from urban migration were strategies that bridged the simple dynamic of either urban development or rural development impacting on family welfare it is suggested that household models of economy adopt some measure to express the relationship of household wealth to remittances from urban migrants

remittances and savings from international migration theory and evidence using a matched sample abstract the central question of this paper concerns the implications of remittance flows for migrants and their origin households in the country of origin this paper represents the first attempt to present a disaggregated view of international remittance flows using a matched sample of international migrants and their origin families i investigate two types of remittances transfers to the home family and savings in the country of origin the empirical evidence provides support for the altruistic model of transfer behavior wealthier origin families tend to receive lower transfers other things being equal however remittances sent to finance origin country investments are positively associated with origin household wealth the estimation strategy addresses two common problems that arise in investigating remittance behavior omitted variable bias and the measurement of origin household resources

aggregate health care expenditure in the united states evidence from cointegration tests unlike recent studies that are based on international cross sectional series this paper attempts to quantify the role of the determinants of aggregate health care expenditure per capita using time series data for the period of 1960 87 for the united states the paper applies the relatively new procedures of unit root testing cointegration and error correction modelling the evidence supports cointegration although the results indicate that per capita income age of the population number of practising physicians and public financing of health care are important determinants the age structure of the population and number of practising physicians emerge as the major determinants of aggregate health care expenditure in the united states

medical care costs how much welfare loss hardly a week goes by without a front page newspaper article on rising health care costs and the uninsured in this article i focus mainly on costs arguing that the issue has been somewhat misconceived while the level of medical care spending in the u s is a cause for concern the welfare losses associated with rises in that level of spending may not be as large as the public rhetoric can make them seem in fact cost containment may not be as urgent as is widely supposed and some proposed cost containment policies may result in welfare losses for the insured and even increase the number of uninsured

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

empirical generalizations from reference price research considerable theoretical justification for consumers use of psychological reference points exists from the research literature from a managerial perspective one of the most important applications of this concept is reference price an internal standard against which observed prices are compared in this paper we propose three empirical generalizations that are well supported in the marketing literature first there is ample evidence that consumers use reference prices in making brand choices second the empirical results on reference pricing also support the generalization that consumers rely on past prices as part of the reference price formation process third consistent with other research on loss aversion consumers have been found to be more sensitive to losses i e observed prices higher than reference prices than gains we also propose topics for further research on reference prices

reexamining latitude of price acceptability and price thresholds predicting basic consumer reaction to price behavioral pricing research has shown consumers to have lower and upper price thresholds represented by an inverted u shaped price acceptability function we propose another basic reaction to price namely lower price is better represented by a decreasing acceptability function without a lower price threshold a set of variables is hypothesized to predict consumer reaction to price price consciousness price quality relation and product involvement are shown to influence the shape of the price acceptability function a procedure and model to scale price acceptability and obtain acceptability functions are introduced and applied the cumulative results suggest reliable acceptability scales along with evidence for convergent and construct validity

the roles of destination gender and household composition in explaining remittances an analysis for the dominican sierra two non exclusive hypotheses about what motivates remittances sent by dominican migrants to their rural parents in the sierra are tested a an insurance contract taken by parents with their migrant children and b an investment by migrants in potential bequests results show that the relative importance of these two motives to remit is affected by destination us vs cities in the dominican republic gender and household composition the insurance function is mainly fulfilled by female migrants to the us only when a male is the sole migrant in his household does he play the role of insurer investment by contrast is pursued by both males and females but only among those migrating to the us d 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

remittances deteriorate governance abstract i use a natural experiment of oil price driven remittance flows to poor non oil producing muslim countries to demonstrate that remittances deteriorate the quality of governance especially in countries with weak democratic institutions the results indicate that a 1 standard deviation increase in remittances raises corruption by 1 5 index points on a 6 point scale which is equivalent to a dollar 600 decrease in per capita gdp concomitantly remittances may enable governments to reduce their delivery of public services for example health care school enrollment the results suggest that political institutions may mediate the potentially beneficial socioeconomic effects of remittance inflows

native internal migration and the labor market impact of immigration this paper presents a theoretical and empirical study of how immigration influences the joint determination of the wage structure and internal migration behavior for native born workers in local labor markets using data from the 1960 2000 decennial censuses the study shows that immigration is associated with lower in migration rates higher out migration rates and a decline in the growth rate of the native workforce the native migration response attenuates the measured impact of immigration on wages in a local labor market by 40 to 60 per cent depending on whether the labor market is defined at the state or metropolitan area level

remittances and the wage impact of immigration this paper examines how the outflow of remittances affect the wages of native workers the model shows that the wage impact of immigration depends on the competing effects of an increase in labor market competition and an increase in the consumer base immigrant remittances provide a unique way of isolating this latter effect because they reduce the consumer base but not the workforce the predictions of the model are tested using an unusually rich german data set that has detailed information on remittances and wages as expected the results indicate that a 1 percent increase in remittances depress the wages of native workers by 0 06 percent furthermore remittances predominantly affect workers in nontraded industries that are more reliant on domestic consumption

international migration remittances and household investment evidence from philippine migrants exchange rate shocks how do households respond to overseas members economic shocks overseas filipinos in dozens of countries experienced sudden heterogeneous changes in exchange rates during the 1997 asian financial crisis appreciation of a migrant s currency against the philippine peso leads to increases in household remittances from overseas the estimated elasticity of philippine peso remittances with respect to the exchange rate is 0 60 positive migrant shocks lead to enhanced human capital accumulation and entrepreneurship in origin households child schooling and educational expenditure rise while child labour falls households also work more hours in self employment and become more likely to start relatively capital intensive household enterprises

the effect of low skilled immigration on u s prices evidence from cpi data i exploit the large variation across u s cities and through time in the relative size of the low skilled immigrant population to estimate the causal effect of immigration on prices of nontraded goods and services using an instrumental variables strategy i find that at current immigration levels a 10 percent increase in the share of low skilled immigrants in the labor force decreases the price of immigrant intensive services such as housekeeping and gardening by 2 percent wage equations suggest that lower wages are a likely channel through which these effects take place however wage effects are significantly larger for low skilled immigrants than for low skilled natives implying that the two are imperfect substitutes

migration remittances and male and female employment patterns little is known about the labor market impacts of workers remittances despite their magnitude in countries with considerable outmigration reports that families receiving international remittances severely curtail their work efforts are fairly common in the popular press e g robert frank 2001 yet we lack rigorous analyses of how male and female labor supplies respond to increases in remittance income to either support or refute these anecdotal observations according to the neoclassical model of labor leisure choice mark r killingsworth 1983 remittances a source of nonlabor income may lift budget constraints raise reservation wages and through an income effect reduce the employment likelihood and hours worked by remittance receiving individuals the receipt of remittances is usually preceded by the out migration of working aged household members however which may induce changes in the labor supply of nonmigrating household members in order to compensate for forgone income or to defray migration related expenses distinguishing the disruptive effect from the income effect of remittance inflows is problematic as most surveys do not contain detailed information on household outmigration and remittance receipt to the extent that these two effects are expected to have opposite impacts on labor supply however we can assess which effect dominates the impact of remittances on the decision to work has been previously examined by edgard rodriguez and erwin r tiongson 2001 in manila and by edward funkhouser 1992 in managua without accounting for the endogeneity of remittances with respect to labor supply they conclude that remittances reduce employment funkhouser also finds that remittances slightly increase self employment while informative these studies focus on the decision to work and do not consider that without altering employment rates remittances may change the hours worked and or the type of work performed in the receiving economy furthermore the impact may be different on male and female labor supplies and responsiveness to remittance income may vary from rural to urban areas using data from mexico a country with a large and growing remittance inflow we address the following questions how does the employment status and hours worked by men and women vary owing to international remittances do male and female labor supplies differ across various types of employment in rural versus urban areas due to higher remittance inflows

consumer price and promotion expectations an experimental study the authors report results from a controlled experiment designed to investigate the impact of a brand s price promotion frequency and the depth of promotional price discounts on the price consumers

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

the effect of plausible and exaggerated reference prices on consumer perceptions and price search this article examines whether advertisers regular price claims affect consumer perceptions and price search behavior experiments involving simulated shopping via personal computers indicate that compared to an ad with no reference price an ad with a plausible reference price raised subjects estimates of the advertiser s regular price and the perceived offer value an exaggerated reference price had generally the same positive effects on perception as a plausible reference price even for the more skeptical subjects further when subjects were presented with an advertised sale price above the lowest expected price the exaggerated reference price increased the percentage of subjects who purchased the product from the advertiser without checking other stores prices

robust determinants of health care expenditure growth our aim is to disclose robust explanatory variables for health care expenditure hce growth by introducing to this field of research a method that is especially well suited for situations of model uncertainty the extreme bounds analysis eba we analyse data for 33 oecd countries over the period 1970 2010 and include as far as it is statistically feasible all macroeconomic and institutional determinants of hce growth in the eba that have been suggested in the literature furthermore we analyse to what extent outliers in the data influence the results our results confirm earlier findings that gdp growth and a variable representing baumol s cost disease theory emerge as robust and statistically significant determinants of hce growth depending on whether or not outliers are excluded we find up to six additional robust drivers the growth in expenditure on health administration the change in the share of inpatient expenditure in total health expenditure the lagged government share in gdp t

is the new immigration really so bad this article reviews the recent evidence on us immigration focusing on two key questions 1 does immigration reduce the labour market opportunities of less skilled natives 2 have immigrants who arrived after the 1965 immigration reform act been successfully assimilated overall evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant on the question of assimilation the success of the us born children of immigrants is a key yardstick by this metric post 1965 immigrants are doing reasonably well even children of the least educated immigrant origin groups have closed most of the education gap with the children of natives

remittances and temporary migration in this paper we study the remittance behavior of immigrants and how it relates to temporary versus permanent migration plans we use a unique data source that provides unusual detail on remittances and return plans and follows the same household over time our data allows us also to distinguish between different purposes of remittances we analyze the association between individual and household characteristics and the geographic location of the family as well as return plans and remittances the panel nature of our data allows us to condition on household fixed effects to address measurement error and reverse causality we use an instrumental variable estimator our results show that changes in return plans are related to large changes in remittance flows

correlates of price acceptability the cognitive tradeoff between price and product quality is used as a basis for hypothesizing interrelationships between two individual difference variables and two price related responses results of a correlational study support the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between price consciousness and product involvement and the hypotheses that price consciousness and product involvement have opposite implications for several price related constructs results also indicate a positive relationship between price acceptability level and the width of the latitude of price acceptance

does the u s health care sector suffer from baumol s cost disease evidence from the 50 states this study examines if health care costs in the united states are affected by baumol s cost disease it relies on an empirical test proposed by hartwig 2008 and extended by colombier 2010 and uses a panel data set of 50 states over the 1980 2009 period the results suggest that health care costs grow more rapidly when economy wide wage increases exceed productivity gains the findings are fairly robust with respect to time and state fixed effects individual state time trends and two stage least square estimation consequently this study suggests that the u s health care sector suffers from baumol s cost disease

cost disease in defense and public administration baumol and politics william baumol s model predicts a steady increase in relative public sector prices or costs because of the combination of slow productivity growth and wage growth similar to sectors wherein productivity is growing more quickly in this paper we extend the baumol model with political variables and analyze price growth in defense and public administration using norwegian data we find strong support for the mechanism of the baumol model since manufacturing productivity is the most important determinant of relative public sector prices greater political fragmentation has also contributed to the price growth but its quantitative effect is smaller than that of manufacturing productivity an analysis of a labor intensive private service restaurants and cafes supports the broader relevance of the baumol mechanism and the validity of the estimated effect of political fragmentation on the two sectors considered herein

fooled by heteroscedastic randomness local consistency breeds extremity in price based quality inferences in some product categories low priced brands are consistently of low quality but high priced brands can be anything from terrible to excellent in other product categories high priced brands are consistently of high quality but quality of low priced brands varies widely three experiments demonstrate that such heteroscedasticity leads to more extreme price based quality predictions this finding suggests that quality inferences do not only stem from what consumers have learned about the average level of quality at different price points through exemplar memory or rule abstraction instead quality predictions are also based on learning about the covariation between price and quality that is consumers inappropriately conflate the conditional mean of quality with the predictability of quality we discuss implications for theories of quantitative cue learning and selective information processing for pricing strategies and luxury branding and for our understanding of the emergence and persistence of erroneous beliefs and stereotypes beyond the consumer realm

baumol s cost disease and the sustainability of the welfare state if productivity increases more slowly for services than for manufactured goods then services suffer from baumol s cost disease and tend to become relatively more costly over time since the welfare state in all countries is an important supplier of tax financed services this translates into a financial pressure that seems to leave policymakers with a trilemma increase tax distortions cut spending or redistribute less under the assumptions underlying baumol s cost disease we show that these dismal implications are not warranted the welfare state is sustainable and there is even scope for pareto improvements under baumol s cost disease

stationarity of health expenditures and gdp evidence from panel unit root tests with heterogeneous structural breaks this paper re examines the stationarity of national health care expenditures and gdp in a panel setting utilizing data from 20 oecd countries over the period from 1960 to 1997 previous research in this area has recognized the drawback of not allowing for structural breaks in their unit root tests and noted that their empirical results may not be robust we advance the literature by utilizing a recently developed panel lm unit root test that allows for heterogeneous level shifts in contrast to previous analyses that did not consider breaks our results reject the unit root null hypothesis for both series