explaining us immigration 1971 1998 abstract in this paper we develop and estimate a model to explain variations in immigration to the united states by source country since the early 1970s the explanatory variables include ratios to the united states of source country income and education as well as relative inequality in addition we incorporate the stock of previous immigrants and a variety of variables representing different dimensions of the immigration quotas set by policy we use the results to shed light on the impact of policy by simulating the effects of the key changes in immigration policy since the late 1970s we also examine the factors that influenced the composition of u s immigration by source region over the entire period

do potential migrants internalize migrant rights in oecd host societies this paper analyzes how countries provision of migrant rights affects potential migrants destination choice combining data on bilateral migration desires from over 140 origin countries and data on migrant rights in 38 mainly oecd destination countries over the period 2007 2014 we find that potential migrants tend to favour destinations that are more open to the inclusion of immigrants into their society in particular better access to and conditions on the labour market as well as access to nationality and to permanent residency significantly increase the perceived attractiveness of a destination country these results are robust across different specifications and hold for subsamples of origin countries as well as of destinations moreover some results vary across types of respondents educational opportunities for migrants for instance affect the migration desires of individuals aged 15 to 24 years but less so of individuals in other age groups

a gravity model analysis of international migration to north america this study examines the influence of political economic and demographic factors on the size and composition of migration flows to north america a modified gravity model is specified and adjusted to include immigration regulations and characteristics specific to the origin and destination countries for empirical test of the model the time period of study is from 1976 1986 and 70 countries are covered for a total of 1540 observations of migration flows to canada and the usa the results reveal that the population of origin countries and the income of destination countries are two major determinants of migration to north america high population areas of asia and latin america provided a large share of the immigrants domestic restrictions on political and civil freedom in origin countries are found to significantly impair migration to north america

immigration social security and broader fiscal impacts population aging and rising health costs will cause dramatic increases in federal expenditures some decades from now lee et al 1999 rising immigration to the united states may help avert this future crisis by slowing population aging and helping to pay for social security and public health care but many immigrants have low education and high fertility so their net fiscal impact may be costly rather than beneficial this paper revisits our earlier analysis of the fiscal impact of immigration lee and miller 1997 henceforth lm97 in light of higher projected rates of productivity growth an unexpected increase in the effective federal income tax rate in recent years and some revisions of the demographic projections we will emphasize implications for social security and address points raised by the recent literature holger bonin et al 1998 george borjas 1999 alan auerbach and philip oreopolis 2000 kjetil storesletten 2000

working wives and expenditure on services the major focus of this research is the relationship between a wife s employment and expenditure on time saving services multiple regression analysis of data from the 1972 1973 consumer expenditure survey indicates that two measures of the extent of a wife s participation in the labor force were influential in determining monetary outlay on services that are expected to be sensitive to the value of time other factors such as family income education and stage of the family life cycle also exert an impact on expenditure findings indicate that family expenditure on services is a complex process influenced by many factors besides a wife s employment

general economic conditions and national elections the fact that economic conditions influence voters is a leading commonplace of conversation in election years the question is is this fact in fact a fact despite the overwhelming popularity of the fact it has received neither an explicit theoretical analysis presumably because it is so obvious that economic adversity should create political adversaries nor until recently a satisfactory statistical analysis gerald h kramer has presented a multivariate analysis of congressional elections which would strongly suggest that fluctuations in the rate of unemployment have no appreciable effect upon elections but that fluctuations in per capita real income are influential in the following pages i propose to 1 reaffirm his finding on the electoral unimportance of ordinary fluctuations in unemployment 2 argue that contrary to kramer fluctuations in real income also do not have important electoral effects and 3 present an argument based upon rational voter behavior for the unimportance of general economic conditions in national elections

migration and foreign aid when it comes to linkages between migration and the global allocation of foreign development assistance the size of the immigrant population from a recipient country residing in a donor country is an important determinant of dyadic aid commitments two complementary hypotheses probe this relationship first donors use foreign aid to achieve their broader immigration goals targeting migrant sending areas to increase development and decrease the demand for entry into the donor country second migrants already residing in the donor country mobilize to lobby for additional aid for their homeland empirical tests on a large sample of country pairs made up of twenty two donors and more than 150 recipients over the period 1993 to 2008 show robust support for these hypotheses

impact of off farm labor supply on food expenditures of the farm household abstract farm households diversify their income sources by working off the farm this is a risk management strategy that is used by farm households in both developed and developing countries income diversification via off farm work is associated with higher incomes and food consumption however little is known about the association between off farm work and farm household food expenditures in an effort to bridge this gap this study attempts to assess the impact of off farm work decisions by the operator and or the spouse on the food expenditures of the farm household using a nationwide farm household survey in the united states and new econometric method we find that the decisions of the operator and or the spouse to work off the farm are significantly interrelated 29 however these two decisions affect food expenditures in different ways the operator s off farm work decision is positively related to food expenditures while the spouse s decision is negatively associated with expenditures on food by the farm household

the political viability of rule based monetary policy we have estimated two models explaining political support for the president as a function of economic performance one model reflects the assumption characterizing most of the literature that voters indiscriminately punish inflation and unemployment without regard to the tradeoffs between them the other represents a more demanding conception of voter sophistication about macroeconomic possibilities and about control of the money supply while the data do not unambiguously designate a best model of behavior the sophisticated voter hypothesis performs as well as the naive voter hypothesis in the context of our study clearly this result is subject to the usual econometric caveats including possible misspecification of the model multicollinearity among independent variables etc however there is no particular reason to believe that these problems should favor one model as opposed to the other thus while we cannot conclude that voters really think in terms of rates of growth of velocity and natural output we can question the conventional wisdom that consistent rule based monetary policies may not be politically viable

immigration and trade creation econometric evidence from canada immigrants may expand trade with their country of origin owing to superior knowledge of or preferential access to market opportunities the authors test this proposition using canadian trade data with 136 partners from 1980 to 1992 in an augmented gravity equation they find that a 10 percent increase in immigrants is associated with a 1 percent increase in canadian exports to the immigrant s home country and a 3 percent increase in imports they also find that among the primary categories of immigrants independents have the greater influence on trade immigration via the entrepreneur class appears to have less impact on trade than all other classes except refugees

how economic contractions and expansions affect expenditure patterns in this study we attempt to understand how household budget allocations across various expenditure categories change when the economy is in recession or expansion the common assumption is that a household s tastes would not change as a function of economic conditions and therefore any adjustments in expenditure patterns during economic contractions expansions would simply be due to changes in the consumption budget standard economic models translate these budgetary effects into lateral movements along a set of fixed engel curves which relate category expenditure shares to total expenditures we propose and test a conceptual framework based on the notion of relative consumption which prescribes that for any given total consumption budget expenditure shares for positional goods services will decrease during a recession while shares for nonpositional goods services will increase i e shifting the entire engel curve upward or downward depending on the nature of the expenditure category and the economic conditions

illegal immigration a supply side analysis abstract this paper analyzes the supply side determinants of illegal immigration using a three sector general equilibrium model of the source country agricultural liberalization raises illegal immigration while liberalization of the high tech sector reduces it in contrast capital mobility in the source country renders trade policy ineffective for controlling illegal immigration paradoxically increased enforcement by the host country may raise source country unskilled wages although illegal immigration falls finally under capital mobility a rise in the source country restrictions on capital inflow raises the level of illegal immigration and reduces the effectiveness of border enforcement efforts by the host country

currency unions and trade the effect is large the impact of a common currency on trade can be grossly mismeasured if countries that belong to currency unions are systematically different from those that do not and if the relationship between trade and its observable determinants is complex i argue that such complications are plausible and likely to distort the empirical results of a recent economic policy paper by andrew rose issue 30 2000 pp 7 45 using techniques designed to be robust in this situation i find that the effects of common currency on international trade are considerably less dramatic and much less precisely estimated copyright cepr ces msh 2001

dual citizenship allowance and migration flow an origin story what effect does variation in dual citizenship policies of both sending and receiving societies have on bilateral migration flow employing a modified gravity model we use a new dual citizenship d

does there exist a political business cycle a box tiao analysis theories of the political business cycle are by now common they range from the elegant theoretical work of nordhaus 1975 to the essentially empirical work of tufte 1978 they all assume that politicians manipulate the economy to aid their reelection efforts in particular politicians manipulate macroeconomic policy to create a boom just before election day golden and poterba 1980 provide an excellent review of this literature both tufte and nordhaus provide casual evidence for the existence of a political business cycle using inflation and unemployment rates as indicators of macroeconomic outcomes tufte and nordhaus predict at a minimum that unemployment should be decreasing before election day if presidents are really manipulating the economy very well then unemployment should be at a minimum in the october before the election and hence should be rising after the election in the nordhaus version the economy pays for the pre election boom with a post election surge in the inflation rate nordhaus also suggests that the president should engineer a recession early in his term to reduce inflationary expectations tufte 1978 20 presents graphs of the unemployment series and claims that visual examination shows them to be generally consistent with the hypothesis however he provides no statistical tests of the hypothesis nor does he estimate the quantitative impact of elections on unemployment tufte does not examine the inflation series nordhaus restricts himself to comparing unemployment rates in the two years preceeding and following an election with a simple nonparametric test supporting the hypothesis the literature provides several good empirical tests of the political business cycle hypothesis both paldam 1979 and mccallum 1978 test for the existence of four year cycles and find none however they do not test for discontinuous changes in the series around election day golden and poterba examine whether the use of policy instruments changes near election day and

distance trade and fdi a hausman taylor sur approach this paper analyses the effects of distance as a common determinant of exports and fdi in a three factor new trade theory model assuming that distance affects both pure trade costs and plant set up costs exports and fdi are not necessarily substitutes with respect to distance since the predicted impact depends on its importance for fixed plant set up costs relative to transportation costs and on the relative importance of vertical mnes for the empirical specification we suggest that the impact of time invariant variables such as distance is most appropriately analysed in a hausman taylor sur model we apply our model to industry level data of bilateral outward fdi stocks and exports of the us and germany copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

the political theory of the business cycle two strands of recent empirical work pose a challenge for the macro theorist when brought together one is the rational expectations interpretation of the business cycle the other is the political theory of the business cycle this paper attempts a reconciliation of these two strands in a theory where national political parties have to satisfy the preference of their own supporters as well as the floating voter the implications are that party voters evaluate government performance with respect to expected inflation and output and their variances and that parties will pursue different feedback rules

sovereign debt migration pressure and government survival as soon as the sovereign debt crisis began it was widely understood that germany s response would dictate its ultimate resolution whereas the initial round of bailouts stabilized markets and pres

a new view of political accountability for economic performance most political support models imply that in evaluating economic performance voters use a standard that would provide poor predictions of the future and leave the economy vulnerable to manipulation by vote hungry politicians drawing on macroeconomic theory we develop a simple standard of evaluation which encompasses a concern not only for current economic outcomes but also for accurately assessed future consequences of current policies we find that political support for the president can be explained as well by models that assume that voters use this sophisticated standard as by models that assume voter naivete our analysis questions the wisdom of measures typically used to assess voter evaluation of economic performance in a variety of theoretical contexts the results also help to explain the absence of convincing evidence that governments exploit voter ignorance in manipulating the economy

the endogeneity between language and earnings international analyses this study is concerned with the determinants of dominant language fluency its effects on earnings and its endogeneity with earnings among immigrants dominant language fluency is hypothesized to

economic expectations and voting behavior in united states house and senate elections past individual level studies of economic voting 1 have incorrectly operationalized the model they employ by using past oriented rather than future oriented questions and 2 have failed to examine the level of economic voting in united states senate elections using the 1978 national election study we show that economic voting exists in senate but not house elections presumably due to the differences in electoral context even when economic voting occurs however there is no guarantee that the public will influence the direction of macroeconomic policy

presidential popularity and macroeconomic performance are voters really so naive f ollowing the pioneering work of kramer 1971 numerous studies have analyzed the relationships between the macroeconomic performance of political administrations and their popularity or vote getting ability kramer s work showed that the aggregate congressional vote for an incumbent party can be explained rather well by variables indicating recent economic performance subsequent works have extended kramer s research by explaining presidential vote or gallup poll popularity data with similar models on one point almost all of these studies agree 2 votes and popularity can be explained well by models which suppose that voters judge policymakers on the basis of retrospective evaluation of past macroeconomic outcomes most authors interpret their results as being supportive of the hypothesis of rational voters since the evidence indicates that voting decisions are not based purely upon personalities party affiliation or chance kramer argued that if voters regard past macroeconomic performance of an administration to be indicative of future performance then a concern with past performance indicates a concern for future performance voters who simply extrapolate from the past to predict the future are rather naive however a sophisticated voter who has an understanding of the important intertemporal constraints embodied in the structure of the economy would be able to forecast future consequences of current policy choices more accurately than one who simply extrapolates if votes and popularity are simply functions of past outcomes then voters must either be ignorant of the basic structure of the economy or unconcerned with the future the supposition that voters are so naive might run counter to the intuition of most economists who generally assume individual rationality as a central behavioral postulate nevertheless the empirical results noted above have been accepted by many as evidence that voters do misperceive their own long run interest the implications of the naive voter hypothesis for macroeconomic policymaking are disturbing nordhaus 1975 has developed a model which shows that voter naivete can encourage vote maximizing politicians to induce political business cycles and an inflationary bias there is some but not unanimous empirical support for the existence of politically motivated business cycles and casual empiricism also suggests that politicians themselves believe in the naive voter 3 while studies show that empirical evidence is consistent with the notion that voters are concerned with the recent past the results do not reject a sophisticated voter hypothesis none of the aforementioned studies has tested a model consistent with a sophisticated voter hypothesis i e a model in which voters understand what outcomes are feasible in the long and short runs and are concerned with future as well as current and past economic performance in this paper we develop such a model and estimate it using gallup poll data on presidential popularity results of this model are compared to results from a naive voter model similar to those employed in previous research received for publication february 4 1982 revision accepted for publication july 30 1982 university of south carolina i am grateful for helpful comments provided by ray fair douglas hibbs william keech daniel richards abel l da costa fernandes and an anonymous referee i also wish to thank william keech for providing me with the gallup poll data on presidential approval rates aurel schubert provided excellent research assistance fair 1978a bloom and price 1975 arcelus and meltzer 1975 and pollard 1981 a 1981 b have all estimated models to explain voting while frey and schneider 1978 and hibbs i 982a 1982b have developed models to explain presidential popularity 2 an exception is provided by arcelus and meltzer 1975 3nordhaus 1975 and tufte 1978 have provided evidence of political business cycles for a number of western democracies and frey and schneider 1978 and maloney and smirlock 1981 have estimated policy reaction functions suggesting that the timing of elections affects policymaking see tufte for a discussion of casual empirical evidence indicating that politicians believe that current economic conditions affect electoral outcomes

the fiscal impact of immigration on the advanced economies this paper is concerned with the advanced economies it begins with a discussion of the demo graphic issues that have played such a large role in the debate on immigration this is followed by a section on the main problems involved in estimating the fiscal impact of immigration and then a summary of the international evidence on this topic mostly from europe and america separate sections on the uk and on low fertility countries follow the main conclusions are as follows highly skilled migrants normally make a large fiscal contribution whereas unskilled migrants are likely to impose a net cost on native taxpayers if they settle in the receiving country however even unskilled migrants may be net contributors if they eventually depart and make few claims on government expenditure while in the country most empirical studies find that the fiscal contribution of the immigrant population as a whole is quite small the positive contribution of some migrants is largely or wholly offset by the negative contribution of others this finding holds across a variety of countries and methodologies estimates of the net fiscal contribution of immigration normally lie within the range 1 per cent of gdp there are a few exceptions but these refer to countries experiencing demographic collapse and they are based on unrealistic assumptions about the inter generational allocation of future taxes and government expenditure with more realistic assumptions the overall fiscal benefit of immigration is quite small even in these countries these findings suggest that in general there is no strong fiscal case for or against sustained large scale immigration the desirability or otherwise of large scale immigration should be decided on other grounds

searching for the effect of immigration on the labor market we compare two approaches to analyzing the effects of immigration on the labor market and find that the estimated effect of immigration on u s native labor outcomes depends critically on the empirical experiment used area analyses contrast the level or change in immigration by area with the level or change in the outcomes of non immigrant workers factor proportions analyses treat immigrants as a source of increased national supply of workers of the relevant skill the different effects of immigration on native outcomes in the area and factor proportions methodologies appear to result from the diluting effect of native migration flows across regions and failure to take adequate account of other regional labor market conditions in area comparisons excerpt

the new economics of labor migration this paper reviews selected theoretical and empirical developments in the field of labor migration economics the migration behavior of individuals differs in accordance with their perceived relative deprivation those who are relatively more deprived tend to have stronger incentive to migrate than those who are relatively less deprived moreover a reference group characterized by more income inequality is likely to generate more relative deprivation highly skilled workers are also more likely to migrate migration decisions are often made jointly by the migrant and nonmigrant with a contractual arrangement regarding the sharing of costs and returns the exchange of commitments to share income provides coinsurance of particular interest are the determinants of the speed of adoption of migration as an innovation and the characteristics associated with the delay in the adoption of innovation new econometric techniques including techniques for the analysis of qualitative dependent variables techniques that correct for sample selection bias and those for the analysis of longitudinal data have substantially benefited empirical research in this area new methods that can correct for the biased estimate of the wages particular individuals would receive at 2 or more locations at the same point in time allow researchers to test locational decsion making models estimates of these structural models of labor migration support the hypothesis that individuals respond to income incentives in making the decsion to migrate further research is needed on the pazzling observation that migrant workers earn less than native born workers with similar characteristics during the 1st few years after migration but more thereafter other topics that need further research include the macroeconomic effects of migration the microeconomic and macroeconomic relationships between aging and labor migration and the migration behavior of dual earner families

on migration and risk in ldcs the authors develop the hypothesis that aversion to risk rather than expectations of higher income is the primary motivation for rural urban migration in developing countries this hypothesis maintains that an optimizing risk averse small farmer family will try to place a family member in the urban sector in order to diversify its income portfolio an additional hypothesis related to risk is also considered at the individual rather than the family level annotation

welfare and the multifaceted decision to move are poor single mothers more likely to stay in or move to states with higher welfare benefits this question has important implications on at least two levels as a policy matter the answer will enlighten us about the effects of welfare on society and will assist efforts to understand whether states systematically lower benefits in order to avoid becoming welfare magnets peterson and rom 1989 rom peterson and scheve 1998 volden 2002 this answer will also help us anticipate how welfare policies may evolve in other areas of the world where it is or is becoming as easy to move across jurisdictional boundaries as in the united states as a theoretical matter understanding the relationship between welfare and migration can help us better understand how the increasing mobility of people firms and capital affects governmental capacities to provide welfare and other redistributive benefits if generous government benefits prompt people who receive them to flow in and the people who pay for them to flow out the benefits will become increasingly difficult to sustain this is true not only for a federal system such as the united states but also for the international system in which political social and economic barriers to migration have fallen dramatically in recent years finding that welfare induced migration occurs in the united states would enhance concern about governmental capacity for social services finding no such behavior on the other hand would make us less inclined to believe that migration constrains governments in other less likely contexts lately most scholars researching the question have found very little or no support for the idea that welfare affects migration in the united states allard and danziger 2000 levine and zimmerman 1999 schram nitz and krueger 1998 schram and soss 1999 they conclude that the evidence is at best mildly in favor of the idea that welfare affects migration brueckner

migration and incomes in source communities a new economics of migration perspective from china the objective of this paper is to understand the effects of china s migration on source communities and to discuss their policy implications we draw from new economics of labor migration nelm theory to understand how migration and migrant remittances can relax or tighten market constraints in china s rural economy using simultaneous equation econometric techniques and household survey data from china we estimate net sectorspecific effects of migration on rural household income focusing on farm production and self employment our econometric findings indicate that the loss of labor to migration has a negative effect on household cropping income in source areas however we provide evidence that remittances sent home by migrants positively compensate for this lost labor effect contributing to household incomes directly and indirectly by stimulating crop and possibly self employment production this finding offers evidence in support of the nelm hypothesis that remittances loosen constraints on production in the imperfect market environments characterizing rural areas in less developed countries taking into account both the multiple effects of migration and the change in household size participating in migration increases household per capita income between 14 and 30 percent migration and incomes in source communities a new economics of migration perspective from china china is experiencing the largest peacetime flow of labor out of agriculture ever witnessed in world history solinger 1999 rozelle et al 1999 despite the rapid expansion of labor migration china s work force is still disproportionately employed in agriculture compared to other countries at similar levels of per capita gdp taylor and martin 2001 hence as china s economy continues to expand the flow of labor to urban areas will continue and even accelerate johnson 1999 the massive flow of labor away from farms has intensified research interest in china s migration in recent years however as in the broader literature on migration in less developed countries most recent studies on china s migration have focused on determining the size and composition of the labor flow macroeconomic implications of increased migration and the effects of migration on urban areas zhao 1999 yang 1999 1997 less emphasis has been placed on researching the effects of migration on the rural communities that migrants leave even though evidence shows that the rural household in the village of origin is typically the central concern of all those involved in migration both those who leave and those who stay behind exceptions include wang and zuo 1999 bai 2001 moreover the recent increase in migration has left policy makers particularly concerned regarding the way source communities will be affected moa 1999 they are concerned that as labor flows away from farms food production and crop income will decline potentially threatening china s food security furthermore policy makers are concerned about the increasing gap between urban and rural household incomes if migration exacerbates this gap some fear that as it grows rural residents eventually will flood cities ill equipped to absorb them others fear that discontent over a rising urban rural income gap could even spill over into political unrest yang 1999 because china s markets and other modern economic institutions are still relatively undeveloped migration may play a pivotal role in creating or overcoming constraints caused by the lack of well functioning markets and or institutions knight and song 1999 benjamin and brandt 2000 the new economics of labor migration nelm literature analyzes migration as a household decision rather than as an individual decision stark 1991 the nelm hypothesizes that rural households facing imperfect market environments decide

harnessing the diaspora dual citizenship migrant return remittances political rights provided to immigrants by host countries have received much attention in the literature less attention however has been paid to the extension of extraterritorial rights by home countries in this article i focus on a common type of right provided by home countries to their expatriates the right of dual citizenship dual citizenship rights i argue help home countries leverage the financial and human resources of their diasporas encouraging both remittances and return migration i test this argument using migrant surveys performed in six host countries and find that migrants from homelands that extend dual citizenship are more likely to both remit and express a desire to return home the micro finding regarding remittances is confirmed using aggregate panel data for a large sample of homelands over the period 1980 2009 the results point to the importance of political rights and policies as extended by the migrant s homeland

durables and wives employment yet again the literature examining the relationship between consumer durables expenditures and wives employment is analyzed several deficiencies in the literature are corrected in a revised model that is estimated with data from the 1977 1978 survey of consumer expenditures this article concludes that durables expenditures and wives employment time are complements

the effect of naturalization on wage growth a panel study of young male immigrants for young male immigrants naturalization facilitates assimilation into the u s labor market following naturalization immigrants gain access to public sector white collar and union jobs and wage growth accelerates consistent with removal of employment barriers the faster wage growth of immigrants who naturalize might alternatively result from greater human capital investment prior to naturalization stemming from a long term commitment to u s labor markets but there is no evidence that wage growth accelerates or the distribution of jobs improves until citizenship is attained finally the gains from naturalization are greater for immigrants from less developed countries and persist when we control for unobserved productivity

what s driving mexico u s migration a theoretical empirical and policy analysis using data gathered in 25 mexican communities the authors link individual acts of migration to 41 theoretically defined individual household community and macroeconomic level predictors the indicators vary through time to yield a discrete time event history analysis over the past 25 years probabilities of first repeat and return migration have been linked more to the forces identified by social capital theory and the new economics of migration than to the cost benefit calculations assumed by the neoclassical model the authors find that mexico u s migration stems from three mutually reinforcing processes social capital formation human capital formation and market consolidation

familiarity breeds investment diaspora networks and international investment what explains cross national patterns of international portfolio and foreign direct investment fdi while existing explanations focus on the credibility of a policy maker s commitment we emphasize the role of diaspora networks we hypothesize that diaspora networks connections between migrants residing in investing countries and their home country influence global investment by reducing transaction and information costs this hypothesis is tested using dyadic cross sectional data for both portfolio and fdi the findings indicate that even after controlling for a multitude of factors disapora networks have both a substantively significant effect and a statistically significant effect on cross border investment

emigration and democracy migration is an important yet neglected determinant of institutions this paper documents the channels through which emigration affects home country institutions and considers dynamic panel regressions for a large sample of developing countries the authors find that emigration and human capital both increase democracy and economic freedom this implies that unskilled skilled emigration has a positive ambiguous impact on institutional quality simulations show an impact of skilled emigration that is generally positive significant for a few countries and for many countries once incentive effects of emigration on human capital formation are accounted for

wives labor force behavior and family consumption patterns in 1940 the labor force participation rate for married women husband present was 14 percent by 1970 it had increased 26 percentage points to 40 percent the supply and demand variables associated with this increase have been widely investigated however there has been ve ry little research on the economic effects of wives labor force participation see r agarwala and j drinkwater margaret carroll robert holbrook and frank stafford lucy mallan and jacob mincer this paper analyzes two economic effects the effect on the ratio of consumption to income ciy and the effect on the ratio of durable goods purchases to income durly the primary question addressed is controlling for total family income and several other variables what are the differences if any in the ratios of ciy and durly for working wife w w and nonworking wife n w w families looked at in another way the question may be rephrased how do w w families use wives income

expenditure pattern differentials between one earner and dual earner households 1972 1973 and 1984 the impact of women s changing work roles on household expenditures by married couples is analyzed for 1972 1973 and 1984 utilizing data from the consumer expenditure survey cex one earner households with a non working wife nww are compared at the same level of after tax income to dual earner households in which the wife works part time pww and to those with wives working full time fww the analysis indicates that expenditure shares are fairly consistent among types of households over time in terms of wife s work status and income levels and that income is the most important determinant of expenditures

demographic and economic pressure on emigration out of africa two of the main forces driving european emigration in the late nineteenth century were real wage gaps between sending and receiving regions and demographic booms in the low wage sending regions our new estimates of net migration for the countries of sub saharan africa show that exactly the same forces driving african across border migration are at work today the results suggest that rapid growth in the cohort of potential young emigrants population pressure on the resource base and slow economic growth are likely to intensify the pressure for migration out of africa and into high wage oecd countries over the next two decades

determinants of household expenditures for services data from the bureau of labor statistics consumer expenditure surveys were used to investigate factors influencing household expenditures for services in the united states there were significant differences between families with full time and part time working wives in expenditures on child care food away from home and total services household production variables had a significant impact on service expenditures in most instances while the effects of other variables such as family life cycle education race and geographic location varied by service category and employment status of wife

defying the law of gravity the political economy of international migration bilateral flows of international migrants exhibit tremendous variance both across destination countries and over time to explain this variance studies of international migration tend to focus on economic determinants such as income differentials or on social conditions such as the presence of coethnics in certain destination countries the authors argue that migration is driven not solely by economic or social determinants rather the political environment across destinations plays a substantively large role in influencing bilateral migration flows they test the importance of the political environment citizenship rights and the prominence of right wing parties using data on migration flows from 178 origin countries into 18 destination countries over the period 1980 2006 they find even after controlling for a variety of economic social policy and international variables that variation in political environments across time and destination plays a key role in observed patterns of international migration

immigration and welfare magnets this article investigates if the location choices made by immigrants when they arrive in the united states are influenced by the interstate dispersion in welfare benefits income maximizing behavior implies that foreign born welfare recipients unlike their native born counterparts may be clustered in the states that offer the highest benefits the empirical analysis indicates that immigrant welfare recipients are indeed more heavily clustered in high benefit states than the immigrants who do not receive welfare or than natives as a result the welfare participation rate of immigrants is much more sensitive to changes in welfare benefits than that of natives