a new taxonomy of sudden stops which sudden stops should countries be most concerned about abstract this paper proposes a new taxonomy of sudden stops comprised of seven categories with definitions depending on the behavior of gross and net capital flows the incidence of different types of sudden stops is detailed over time and we relate the type of sudden stop to economic performance sudden stops in net flows associated with reductions in gross inflows are associated with larger falls in output than those where sudden starts in gross outflows dominate the paper further discusses the mechanisms that might result in sudden stops in gross flows that are not sudden stops in net flows such that purchases and sales in financial assets or liabilities do not require a sharp current account adjustment still it is found that sudden stops in gross inflows that do not provoke a sharp contraction in net flows may also be disruptive particularly sudden stops that are driven by other flows which include banking flows the results suggest new avenues for research and future policy analysis

ethnicity neighborhoods and human capital externalities the socioeconomic performance of today s workers depends not only on parental skills but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parents generation or ethnic capital this paper investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods the evidence indicates that residential segregation and the external effect of ethnicity are linked partly because ethnic capital summarizes the socioeconomic background of the neighborhood where the children were raised ethnicity has an external effect even among persons who grow up in the same neighborhood when children are exposed frequently to persons who share the same ethnic background copyright 1995 by american economic association

the economic integration of forced migrants evidence for post war germany the flight and expulsion of germans from eastern europe after world war ii constitutes one of the largest forced population movements in history we analyse the economic integration of these migrants and their offspring in west germany a quarter century after displacement first generation migrants still tend to fare worse economically displaced agricultural workers however exhibit higher incomes than comparable natives as displacement caused large scale transitions out of low paid agriculture differences in economic outcomes of second generation migrants resemble those of the first generation

the origins of intergenerational associations lessons from swedish adoption data we use unique swedish data with information on adopted children s biological and adoptive parents to estimate intergenerational mobility associations in earnings and education we argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad prebirth factors including genes and prenatal environment and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad postbirth factors such as childhood environment we find that both pre and postbirth factors contribute to intergenerational earnings and education transmissions and that prebirth factors are more important for mother s education and less important for father s income we also find some evidence for a positive interaction effect between postbirth environment and prebirth factors

emerging economies business cycles the role of commodity terms of trade news abstract recent empirical work has challenged the hypothesis that terms of trade shocks are an important source of cyclical fluctuations in emerging economies we show that ignoring the news component in the terms of trade movements results in misleading conclusions about their importance as a source of cyclical fluctuations using a sample of latin american countries we identify news augmented commodity terms of trade ctot shocks by maximizing the forecast error variance share of the ctot series at a finite future horizon our identification does not rely on zero impact restrictions typically used in the literature for recovering news shocks accounting for news almost doubles the contribution of ctot to explain cyclical fluctuations news augmented ctot shocks explain almost half of output variations in emerging economies

slipping into and out of poverty the dynamics of spells this paper examines the dynamics of poverty previous analyses have examined either fluctuations in the male heads earnings or the frequency of poverty periods over a fixed time frame our approach depends on a definition of spells of poverty using this methodology we find that the majority of poor persons at any time are in the midst of a rather long spell of poverty the methodology also allows us to estimate that less than 40 percent of poverty spells begin because of a drop in the heads earnings while 60 percent of the spells end when the heads earnings increase thus researchers must focus on household formation decisions and on the behavior of secondary family members there has been a dramatic resurgence recently of discussion of the underclass the discussion is reminiscent of debates about poverty during the 1960s when the notions of a culture of poverty particularly as popularized by michael harrington s other america 1962 dominated both intellectual and policy thinking the idea of an underclass seems inconsistent however with much of the research on the dynamics of poverty during the 1970s that research using new longitudinal data seemed to show that the bulk of the poor were poor for only a few years the research also showed that the poor were a very heterogeneous group including a small minority of persistently poor the persistence of poverty is of interest both for understanding the phenomenon and for developing policy claims about dependency and separate life styles among the poor rest on assumptions about the long term nature of poverty questions

biases in standard measures of intergenerational income dependence abstract estimates of the most common mobility measure the intergenerational elasticity can be severely biased if snapshots are used to approximate lifetime income however little is known about biases in other popular dependence measures using long swedish income series we provide such evidence for log linear and rank correlations and rank based transition probabilities attenuation bias is considerably weaker in rank based measures life cycle bias is strongest in the elasticity moderate in log linear correlations and small in rank based measures however there are important exceptions persistence in the tails of the distribution is considerably higher and long distance downward mobility lower than estimates from short run income suggest

external shocks u s monetary policy and macroeconomic fluctuations in emerging markets estimated structural vars show that external shocks are an important source of macroeconomic fluctuations in emerging markets furthermore u s monetary policy shocks affect interest rates and the exchange rate in a typical emerging market quickly and strongly the price level and real output in a typical emerging market respond to u s monetary policy shocks by more than the price level and real output in the u s itself these findings are consistent with the idea that when the u s sneezes emerging markets catch a cold at the same time u s monetary policy shocks are not important for emerging markets relative to other kinds of external shocks

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

sudden stops and phoenix miracles in emerging markets a decade has passed since the salvos from mexico s tequila crisis of 1994 1995 echoed around the financial world since then many more crises have taken place in emerging market economies ems furthermore crises have tended to bunch together bringing to the forefront the systemic nature of these events true every new crisis has its own idiosyncratic features but useful policy lessons must be derived from robust empirical regularities this is the research strategy we have pursued in the last few years we will report on two types of regularities that strike us as highly robust across em crises a sudden stops of capital inflows and b phoenix miracles a sudden stop is a sharp fall in capital inflows relative to their past trajectory sudden stops are not a common feature in developed economies and display a large degree of temporal bunching suggesting that global capital market turmoil acts as a coordinating factor external to ems as shown in section i however balance sheet effects namely the interaction of large changes in the real exchange rate during sudden stops and liability dollarization i e foreign exchange denominated debts are key in influencing the likelihood of a sudden stop thus even though the initial shock is in principle exogenous to the economy whether or not it materializes into a sudden stop depends on domestic financial vulnerabilities on the other hand a phoenix miracle is defined as a case in which output recovers relatively quickly from a sharp collapse with virtually no recovery in credit or capital inflows and a very weak recovery in investment hence the reference to the mythical bird rising from the ashes the existence of phoenix like recoveries suggests that financial frictions play a key role in pushing economies to the abyss from which in some way or another they can crawl back to safe ground by means less than apparent to the conventional observer looking for standard fundamentals and thus may appear miraculous interestingly the great depression of the 1930s shares some of the key features of phoenix miracles in ems but shows salient differences as well that suggest nominal labor market rigidities are not crucial in explaining output collapse in ems understanding these regularities could and we believe does shed light on policies aimed at preventing crises and attenuating their effects

cross country differences in intergenerational earnings mobility international studies of the extent to which economic status is passed from one generation to the next are important for at least two reasons first each study of a particular country characterizes an important feature of that country s income inequality second comparisons of intergenerational mobility across countries may yield valuable clues about how income status is transmitted across generations and why the strength of that intergenerational transmission varies across countries the e rst section of this paper explains a benchmark measure of intergenerational mobility commonly used in u s studies the second section summarizes comparable empirical e ndings that have accumulated so far for countries other than the united states the third section sketches a theoretical framework for interpreting cross country differences in intergenerational mobility

intergenerational correlations in labor market status a comparison of the united states and germany this paper uses data from the panel study of income dynamics and the german socioeconomic panel to calculate comparable measures of the intergenerational correlations of earnings hours and education in the us and germany the results indicate that there is remarkable similarity across the two countries in the correlations of earnings and of annual work hours of fathers and sons all of the correlations which involve women appear to be weaker in germany than the us perhaps due to the greater integration of women in the us into the labor market they find weak correlations in earnings and work hours for parent child pairs of different sexes in both countries they also find that intergenerational correlations in educational attainment are considerably stronger in the us authors

regression toward mediocrity in economic stature this paper provides estimates of the correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons intergenerational data from the national longitudinal survey are used earlier studies conducted for the united states report elasticities of children s earnings with respect to parent s earnings of 0 2 or less suggesting extensive integenerational mobility these estimates however are biased downward by error contaminated measures of lifetime economic status estimates presented in this paper correct for the problem of measurement error and find the intergenerational correlation in income to be on the order of 0 4 this suggests considerably less intergenerational mobility than previously believed jel j62

sudden stops sectoral reallocations and the real exchange rate abstract a sudden stop of capital flows into a developing country tends to be followed by a rapid switch from trade deficits to surpluses a depreciation of the real exchange rate and decreases in output and total factor productivity substantial reallocation takes place from the nontraded sector to the traded sector we construct a multisector growth model calibrate it to the mexican economy and use it to analyze mexico s 1994 95 crisis when subjected to a sudden stop the model accounts for the trade balance reversal and the real exchange rate depreciation but it cannot account for the decreases in gdp and tfp extending the model to include labor frictions and variable capital utilization we still find that it cannot quantitatively account for the dynamics of output and productivity without losing the ability to account for the movements of other variables

intergenerational income mobility in the united states social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the united states but remarkably little empirical evidence is available the few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error unrepresentative samples or both new estimates based on intergenerational data from the panel study of income dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long run income is at least 0 4 indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research copyright 1992 by american economic association

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

monetary news in the united states and business cycles in emerging economies abstract this paper identifies anticipated news and unanticipated surprise shocks to the u s fed funds rate using fed funds futures contracts and assesses their propagation to emerging economies anticipated shocks are identified as the expected change in the fed funds rate orthogonal to expected u s business cycle conditions while unanticipated shocks are the one step ahead forecast error anticipated shocks explain around half of the narrative series of u s monetary policy shocks to identify the effects of both shocks i estimate a panel var using a sample of emerging economies an anticipated 25 basis points contractionary u s interest rate shock induces a fall of 0 5 in gdp from its trend two quarters before the shock materializes both anticipated and unanticipated changes in the u s interest rate cause significant and quantitatively similar effects the increase of the u s baa corporate spread in response to both shocks significantly exacerbates the response of emerging economies after accounting for anticipation u s interest rate shocks explain 14 of business cycle fluctuations in emerging economies

the intergenerational mobility of immigrants this article analyzes the intergenerational mobility of immigrants using the 1940 70 censuses the study reveals an important link between the earnings of immigrants and the earnings of their american born children although there is some regression toward the mean the earnings of second generation americans are strongly affected by variables describing economic conditions in the source countries of their parents current immigration policy therefore not only determines how immigrants perform in the labor market but also determines tomorrow s differences in the labor market experiences of american born ethnic groups

futures prices as risk adjusted forecasts of monetary policy many researchers have used federal funds futures rates as measures of financial markets expectations of future monetary policy however to the extent that federal funds futures reflect risk premia these measures require some adjustment in this paper we document that excess returns on federal funds futures have been positive on average and strongly countercyclical in particular excess returns are surprisingly well predicted by macroeconomic indicators such as employment growth and financial business cycle indicators such as treasury yield spreads and corporate bond spreads excess returns on eurodollar futures display similar patterns we document that simply ignoring these risk premia significantly biases forecasts of the future path of monetary policy we also show that risk premia matter for some futures based measures of monetary policy shocks used in the literature

public investment and its effects on the burden of the public debt few problems in economics have been so thoroughly debated without being resolved as the question about whether the burden of the public debt is passed on to the future the key issue in the debate is whether taxation and debt are equivalent in their real effects as methods of raising public revenues the question in this form is an old one and both sides of the debate were eloquently discussed by ricardo 2 the purpose of this paper is to present a framework within which the choices facing the many different individuals in the society can be analyzed as is explained below the nature of the economy s adjustment to debt issue cannot be fully understood without first understanding that different individuals will adjust differently to the issuance of additional debt it is unlikely that a single paper could end a debate that is well over two centuries old hence our goal is more modestly to extend the framework of the debate adding some more realistic features to a barro like model illustrates that there are areas of commonality that unite both sides of the debate this study extends the current debate in two ways first it examines the intergenerational transfer of public sector wealth by including the effects of intergenerational bequests of assets in addition to the intergenerational transfer of debt after all when individuals consider the well being of their heirs they must consider the value of the assets that are passed from one generation to the next in addition to the stock of public debt 3 second it

the effects of monetary policy news and surprises there is substantial agreement in the monetary policy literature over the effects of exogenous monetary policy shocks the shocks that are investigated however almost exclusively represent unanticipated changes in policy which surprise the private sector and which are typically found to have a delayed and sluggish effect on output in this paper we estimate a new keynesian model that incorporates news about future policies to try to disentangle the anticipated and unanticipated components of policy shocks the paper shows that the conventional estimates confound two distinct effects on output an effect due to unanticipated or surprise shocks which is smaller and more short lived than the response usually obtained in the literature and a large delayed and persistent effect due to anticipated policy shocks or news news shocks play a larger role in influencing the business cycle than unanticipated policy shocks although the overall fraction of economic fluctuations that can be attributed to monetary policy remains limited

economic and mechanical models of intergenerational transmission the author critically examines gary beckers attempt to integrate the theory of income distribution intragenerational differences with the theory of mobility intergenerational differences in an economic model of the family he assesses beckers claims of distinctiveness integration explanatory power and surprise and arrives at a rather skeptical view of the contribution that the core of microeconomics has made to this study of the family a reply by becker is included pp 514 8 excerpt

intergenerational persistence of earnings the role of early and college education recent empirical evidence from the united states indicates a high degree of persistence in earnings across generations designing effective public policies to increase social mobility requires identifying and measuring the major sources of persistence and inequality in earnings we provide a quantitative model of intergenerational human capital transmission that focuses on three sources innate ability early education and college education we find that approximately one half of the intergenerational correlation in earnings is accounted for by parental investment in education in particular early education we show that these results have important implications for education policy

us monetary policy and the global financial cycle us monetary policy shocks induce comovements in the international financial variables that characterize the global financial cycle a single global factor that explains an important share of the variation of risky asset prices around the world decreases significantly after a us monetary tightening monetary contractions in the us lead to significant deleveraging of global financial intermediaries a decline in the provision of domestic credit globally strong retrenchments of international credit flows and tightening of foreign financial conditions countries with floating exchange rate regimes are subject to similar financial spillovers

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

sudden stops and output drops in recent financial crises and in recent theoretical studies of them abrupt declines in capital inflows or sudden stops have been linked with large drops in output do sudden stops cause output drops no according to a standard equilibrium model in which sudden stops are generated by an abrupt tightening of a country s collateral constraint on foreign borrowing in this model in fact sudden stops lead to output increases not decreases an examination of the quantitative effects of a well known sudden stop in mexico in the mid 1990s confirms that a drop in output accompanying a sudden stop cannot be accounted for by the sudden stop alone to generate an output drop during a financial crisis as other studies have done the model must include other economic frictions which have negative effects on output large enough to overwhelm the positive effect of the sudden stop this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

inquiry on the transmission of u s aggregate shocks to mexico a svar approach abstract we analyze the business cycle co movement between mexico and the us we identify two shocks affecting us aggregate supply three affecting its demand and two types of monetary policy surprises with different financial implications us shocks explain about 75 of expected output fluctuations in mexico at a three year horizon with us demand shocks driving half of these variations alone in turn mexican output responses to a monetary policy surprise in the us depend on the reaction of investors sentiment to said surprise finally for the sample period studied financial market interconnections are as important as goods demand linkages for the international transmission of us shocks

ethnic capital and intergenerational mobility this paper analyzes the extent to which ethnic skill differentials are transmitted across generations i assume that ethnicity acts as an externality in the human capital accumulation process the skills of the next generation depend on parental inputs and on the quality of the ethnic environment in which parents make their investments or ethnic capital the empirical evidence reveals that the skills of today s generation depend not only on the skills of their parents but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parent s generation

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

monetary policy surprises and interest rates evidence from the fed funds futures market abstract this paper estimates the impact of monetary policy actions on bill note and bond yields using data from the futures market for federal funds to separate changes in the target funds rate into anticipated and unanticipated components interest rates response to anticipated target rate changes is small while their response to unanticipated changes is large and highly significant these responses are generally consistent with the expectations hypothesis of the term structure surprise target rate changes have little effect on expectations of future actions however which helps to explain the lack of empirical support for the expectations hypothesis at the short end of the yield curve

catching up the educational mobility of migrants and natives children in europe migrants into european countries are often less educated than european natives we analyse whether migrants children are more or less likely than natives children to achieve upward educational mobility across generations and study differences in the factors which contribute to differences in mobility for the two groups we find that migrants descendants are more often upwardly mobile and less often downwardly mobile than their native peers in the majority of countries studied and show that the main factor contributing to these patterns is the education level of parents although a lower parental education means that their children are less likely to access the same amount of human social and financial capital as children of more highly educated parents migrants descendants over the last two generations were able to make significant progress in reducing education gaps with natives

family economics and macro behavior in this 1987 presidential address to the american economic association the author explores the contributions of the field of family economics to macroeconomic analysis the focus is on family behavior as an active endogenous factor that both affects and is affected by the evolution of the economy much of the time is spent on long term economic growth although i also discuss short and long cycles in economic activity and the interaction between overlapping generations through social security transmission of inequality and in other ways many conclusions in these and presumably other macro areas change radically when family choices get the attention they deserve excerpt

the international transmission of inflation to a small open economy under fixed exchange rates and highly interest sensitive capital flows an empirical analysis abstract this paper deals with the international transmission of inflation to a small open economy soe under fixed exchange rates and facing very interest sensitive capital flows it focuses particular attention on a channel of transmission which has been hitherto largely ignored namely portfolio capital flows arising from the monetary policy actions of the soe s reserve currency country rcc the bulk of the existing literature on this topic regards portfolio capital flows and money in general as having no causative role but simply passively mirroring transmission through commodity markets the model obtains strong support for ireland from 1972 to 1979 during which the ir was maintained in a strict one for one parity with the stg

unobservable family and individual contributions to the distributions of income and wealth this paper uses combinations of full brothers half brothers and fathers and sons to measure the effect of common family background on a household s income and wealth while the data are drawn from a nineteenth century population the intraclass correlation for income ranges from 13 to 18 which is similar to that found in modern samples intraclass correlations for wealth are significantly higher 18 35 than are those for income intraclass correlations of half brothers compared to those for full brothers suggest that fathers play a dominant role in the transmission of the common family effect when unobserved background is decomposed into individual and family effects the individual effect dominates the family effect for income while the family effect dominates the individual effect for wealth

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

the fed and interest rates a high frequency identification we measure monetary policy shocks as changes in the fed funds target rate that surprise bond markets in daily data these shock series avoid the omitted variable time varying parameter and orthogonalization problem of monthly vars and do not impose the expectations hypothesis we find surprisingly large and persistent responses of bond yields to these shocks 10 year rates rise as much as 8 10 of a percent to a one percent target shock the usual view that monetary policy only temporarily raises long term rates and influences inflation would lead one to predict a negative long rate response this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

money debt and prices in the united kingdom this paper is concerned with testing the asset theory of the price level using quarterly uk data over the period 1968 1979 expressed in its most general form the asset theory states that the aggregate price level p is related to real variables such as the level of economic activity y financial wealth and the composition of wealth in terms of financial assets such as money m government bonds b etc this theory has a long tradition and has been revived and developed by blinder and solow 1973 among many others for the present we limit our attention to only two financial assets namely money and government bonds although in principle this set could be enlarged this preoccupation reflects the attention paid to money and bonds in the literature and the requirement that financial assets should be of the outside variety which precludes bank lending corporate liabilities etc hence our general specification of the price level is

snapshots versus movies empirical studies of the intergenerational inheritance of economic status should use observations on complete lifetime status profiles of parents and children to be consistent with underlying theory but they cannot only snapshots rather than movies on status are currently available in samples estimates of the degree of intergenerational inheritance may therefore be subject to lifecycle biases the paper investigates these in the context of a lifecycle earnings model and shows that these biases may be large that their direction varies and that correction methods suggested hitherto have questionable reliability until more complete data sets become available researchers should be more temperate in the conclusions they draw

daily changes in fed funds futures prices this paper explores the properties of daily changes in the prices for near term fed funds futures contracts the paper finds these contracts to be excellent predictors of the fed funds rate and shows that the claim of a nonzero term premium in the short horizon contracts is more sensitive to outliers than previous research appears to have recognized i find some statistically significant evidence of serial correlation in the daily changes but this accounts for only a tiny part of the 1 day movements and there is essentially zero predictability for horizons longer than 1 day settlement futures prices for each day appear to incorporate the information embodied in that day s term structure of longer horizon treasury securities previous employment growth makes a statistically significant contribution to predicting futures price changes though again this could only account for a tiny part of the daily variance the paper concludes that futures prices provide a very useful measure of the daily changes in the market s expectation of near term changes in fed policy

omitted variables in equations relating prices to money this paper considers some of the conditions under which an estimated reduced form equation relating retail prices solely to past values of sterling m3 would provide a reliable guide to the past relationship between these two variables the equation does not appear to be biased by innovations in real output however when overseas variables are included in the reduced form the estimated relationship between money an prices chages significantly this suggests that the estimated parameters in a price equation based on money alone suffer form omitted variable bias

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

intergenerational health mobility an empirical approach based on the echp despite the importance of the study of health mobility few attempts have been made to measure intergenerational mobility not only in the european union but also in other countries such as united states this article is focused on the study of intergenerational health mobility using data from the european community household panel echp in particular the relationships between self assessed health of parents and their sons are analysed the evidence obtained suggests that in spain sons reported health depends significantly on the self assessed health of their fathers

ethnic externalities in education and second generation immigrants i analyse the role of ethnic and native human capital defined respectively as the average years of schooling of ethnic groups and of natives within a specific region and of ethnic concentrations in the educational attainment of second generation immigrants in germany compared to natives children parents education has a small and insignificant effect on second generation immigrants education ethnic concentrations have a negative effect while ethnic capital is insignificant the effect of native capital too is insignificant but much larger in magnitude than the effect of ethnic capital for women mother s education is relatively more important for men ethnic concentrations constitute a stronger impediment to educational attainment than for women