regional migration in britain an analysis of gross flows using nhs central register data the authors extend the use of a hiring function model whereby job seekers are matched with vacancies to the analysis of regional migration in britain annual data from the national health service central register for 1975 1989 are used to show that unemployment and vacancy rates distance and an index of similarities across regions in industry based employment composition help determine migration flows across regions the hiring function approach offers a consistent way of modelling gross and net flows and helps explain both the high level of gross relative to net flows and the tendency for migration to fall in a recession even when unemployment differentials widen excerpt

signalling in a dynamic labour market this paper analyzes a multiperiod version of the spence job market signalling model in which workers cannot commit to an education choice and firms make wage offers at any point in time the dynamic competition combined with the incomplete information yield a multiplicity of sequential equilibria including ones that sustain implicit collusion even though the length of the game is finite emphasis is placed on equilibria that satisfy the independence of never weak best response criterion of kohlberg and mertens 1986 it is shown that in the limit as the time between offers tends to zero any such equilibrium results in expectation in the unique stable outcome of the static spence model

contests with small noise and the robustness of the all pay auction this paper considers all pay contests in which the relationship between bids and allocations reflects a small amount of noise prior work had focused on one particular equilibrium however there may be other equilibria to address this issue we introduce a new and intuitive measure for the proximity to the all pay auction this allows in particular to provide simple conditions under which actually any equilibrium of the contest is both payoff equivalent and revenue equivalent to the unique equilibrium of the corresponding all pay auction the results are shown to have powerful implications for monopoly licensing political lobbying electoral competition optimally biased contests the empirical analysis of rent seeking and dynamic contests

sectoral transformation and labour market flows in this chapter we examine the dynamics of adjustment in the labour market and in particular the movement of workers between industries it is often assumed that the speed with which the labour market must adjust has increased due to globalisation and or technological change if this is the case then these forces may be responsible for greater instability in the workplace the displacement of growing numbers of especially unskilled workers from declining sectors longer periods of unemployment and wage losses

staunching emigration from east germany age and the determinants of migration following the unification of germany in 1990 eastern wages and unemployment both rose rapidly i demonstrate that rising wages reduced eastern emigration greatly while rising unemployment had little effect this reflects the behavior of the young who are very sensitive to source region wages and relatively insensitive to source unemployment i show that most of the effect of source unemployment comes from the contemporaneous effect on those laid off who are more likely to be older i find that compared to stayers young emigrants are much more skilled older emigrants are slightly more skilled and commuters are not more skilled as measured by education and pre move wages my conclusions are based on a comparison of results from aggregate inter state migration data and individual data from the eastern sample of the german socio economic panel for 1990 2000 jel j61 p23

asymmetries in housing and financial market institutions and emu despite convergence pressures differences in housing and financial market institutions across the 15 member states of the european union are still enormous this paper argues that they have profound effects on the responsiveness of output and inflation in the different countries to changes in short term interest rates as well as to asset market shocks of external origin the economic reasoning behind this claim is set out and the institutional differences are described the paper assesses the sometimes conflicting empirical evidence on this issue barriers to convergence and implications for labour market flexibility are discussed the uk ireland finland and sweden tend to cluster at one extreme of the relevant institutional characteristics the paper concludes with a set of proposals for institutional reforms which would significantly reduce the tensions within emu and the potential for instability in these economies entailed by emu membership

regional sorting of human capital the choice of location among young adults in sweden berck p tano s and westerlund o regional sorting of human capital the choice of location among young adults in sweden regional studies migration rates are highest among young adults especially students and their location choices affect the regional distribution of human capital growth and local public sector budgets using swedish register data on young adults the choice of whether to enrol in education and the choice of location are estimated jointly the results indicate a systematic selection into investment in further education based on school grades and associated preferences for locations with higher per capita tax bases for students the estimates indicate lower preferences for locations with higher shares of older people the importance of family networks for the choice of location is confirmed

price competition for an informed buyer abstract this paper investigates price competition with private information on the demand side two sellers each offer a different variety of a good to a buyer endowed with a private binary signal on their relative quality the model provides an informational foundation to differentiation in hotelling s price competition game equilibrium comparative statics is performed with respect to the prior belief and the precision of the private information competition is fierce when the prior strongly favors one seller and private signals are relatively uninformative sellers equilibrium profits may fall with the revelation of public information and are nonmonotonic in the prior belief journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d43 d82 l15

geographic labour mobility and the cost of housing evidence from italy in recent years internal migration in italy has declined markedly notwithstanding the widening of the north south gap in terms of unemployment rates and real income here the extent to which the housing market has contributed to the decline is examined preliminary to this analysis differentials in the cost of housing between the macro areas of the country are estimated using data on the market price of houses located in 96 provincial capitals econometric evidence is provided supporting the view that the north south housing price differential is a notable factor in explaining the falling pattern of mobility the positive impact on migration from the south to the north of a wider gap in the two areas in terms of income and employment prospects has been offset by the housing price differential which has steadily risen at least from the mid 1980s onwards yet a considerable share of the decrease in mobility remains unexplained possibly owing to the heterogeneity in the composition of migration flows

what drives migration moves to urban areas in spain evidence from the great recession during the great recession international emigration skyrocketed while internal migration strongly declined however when the focus is on migration to the larger urban areas in spain an increase i

human capital graduate migration and innovation in british regions with the aid of a geographical information system our paper constructs a three stage least squares simultaneous equation model to investigate the interrelationships between the interregional flows of human capital and the innovation dynamism of a region in order to do this we model the interregional migration behaviour of high quality british university graduates from university into first employment and we relate these human capital flows to both the labour market characteristics and the knowledge characteristics of the employment regions this is done for all industries and separately for just high technology industries our results indicate that for england and wales there is a two way causality between the interregional human capital employment migration flows of recent university graduates and the innovation performance of regions however the results for great britain as a whole depend on whether london is included and scotland is excluded we find little or no support for the argument that the presence of local universities or small firms promotes regional innovation

mixed strategy equilibrium in a market with asymmetric information in the mid 1970s several authors studied models of markets with asymmetric information in which equilibria do not exist although those authors focused on models of insurance and education it was recognized that similar nonexistence problems arise in a wide class of models with asymmetric information recently dasgupta and maskin have demonstrated that for a game theoretic version of at least one of those models although no equilibria may exist in pure strategies equilibria exist in mixed strategies in the present paper we construct a mixed strategy equilibrium for one member of the class spence s signalling model of education qualitative features of the equilibrium are explored

geographical labour mobility migration or commuting eliasson k lindgren u and westerlund o 2003 geographical labour mobility migration or commuting reg studies 37 827 837 in this paper we examine how individual labour market status and spatial variations in employment opportunities influence interregional job search behaviour and mobility decisions in sweden the econometric analysis is based on 290 000 individual observations and refers to the years 1994 95 the empirical results show that the probability of interregional labour mobility unexpectedly decreases with the accessibility to employment opportunities in neighbouring regions as expected the findings reveal that accessibility to job openings in surrounding regions significantly increases the likelihood of choosing commuting as the mobility mode moreover the empirical findings indicate that individual unemployment experience increases the likelihood of mobility as well as migration eliasson k lindgren u et westerlund o 2003 la mobilite geographique du travail la migration

is migration important for regional convergence comparative evidence for norwegian and swedish counties 1980 2000 ostbye s and westerlund o 2007 is migration important for regional convergence comparative evidence for norwegian and swedish counties 1980 2000 regional studies 41 901 915 regional convergence studies have relied on net migration data when assessing the impact of migration with heterogeneous labour the implied symmetrical treatment of immigration and emigration cannot be justified a priori because of heterogeneity among migrants gross migration flows may lead to considerable interregional redistribution of human capital even when net migration is zero moreover the effects of regional economic conditions on gross in and out migration flows may not be symmetric in this comparative study of regional growth and migration the net and the gross migration approaches are compared the results confirm ex post that the net approach cannot be justified and despite sweden and norway being similar in many ways migration has very different effects on convergence in these two countries ostbye s et

residential mobility housing equity and the labour market henley a g 1998 residential mobility housing equity and the labour market economic journal 108 447 414 427

how different are the british in their willingness to move evidence from international social survey data drinkwater s and ingram p how different are the british in their willingness to move evidence from international social survey data regional studies this paper analyses people s willingness to move using data from the 1995 british social attitudes survey and international social survey programme the personal characteristics and sub regional indicators that are important in explaining the willingness to move within britain are identified it is also found that the willingness to move is only higher in a few other countries including the usa the equivalent desire to move is found to be much lower in eastern european countries and in several other european union member states compositional effects such as age and education are generally important in explaining differences in attitudes towards migration in comparison with other western economies however structural effects such as institutions history and culture tend to play a more dominant role in explaining differences compared with countries

testing for long run convergence across regional house prices in the uk a pairwise approach this article tests for stochastic convergence in uk regional house prices using the recently developed pairwise approach this approach allows for unit root tests to be conducted on all n n 1 2 possible pairs of house price differentials across n regions in the uk thus avoiding the need to choose a base region or alternative national figure as the benchmark using mix adjusted house price data from 1973 q4 to 2008 q4 the main finding is that there is no evidence of long run convergence among regional house prices or of an equilibrium relationship towards which uk regional house prices have a tendency to gravitate

signalling to experts we study competitive equilibria in a signalling economy with heterogeneously informed buyers in terms of the classic spence 1973 the quarterly journal of economics 87 355 374 model of job market signalling firms have access to direct but imperfect information about worker types in addition to observing their education firms can be ranked according to the quality of their information i e their expertise in equilibrium some high type workers forgo signalling and are hired by better informed firms which make positive profits workers education decisions and firms use of their expertise are strategic complements allowing for multiple equilibria that can be pareto ranked we characterize wage dispersion and the extent of signalling as a function of the distribution of expertise among firms our model can also be applied to a variety of other signalling problems including securitization corporate financial structure insurance markets or dividend policy

nash equilibrium in competitive insurance i formalize a rather stylized insurance market with adverse selection as a standard duopoly i formally specify demand functions and profits and prove that a nash equilibrium in pure strategies exists if and only if the well known rothschild stiglitz allocation is efficient

methodological aspects of multi criteria decision analysis for policy support a case study on pharmaceutical removal from hospital wastewater abstract decision making in public and political contexts can be complex multi attribute value utility theory mavt maut can support such decision processes by providing a transparent framework that helps focusing on objectives and corresponding degrees of achievement by different alternatives eliciting preferences with mavt maut can be time consuming and cognitively challenging therefore it might not be feasible to elicit full preference functions with standard methods to deal with this problem we suggest a simplified elicitation procedure that combines a the elicitation of values instead of utilities at lower levels of the objectives hierarchy and conversion to utilities to consider risk attitudes at appropriate higher levels b the use of linear value functions for sub objectives with minor effects on the overall value and c sensitivity analyses to check the robustness of results regarding these assumptions and the elicitation process in general furthermore we developed a modified swing procedure reversed swing to elicit weights for cases in which the hypothetical alternatives of the conventional swing technique are unrealistic we applied this procedure to a case study on pharmaceutical removal from wastewater of a typical swiss hospital involving 13 stakeholders aim of the interdisciplinary research group was to assess a large bundle of combinations of novel point source measures the ultimate policy objective was to develop consensus solutions which are acceptable to all important stakeholder groups we hope that the suggested simplified procedure stimulates the application of transparent and conceptually satisfying decision support methods in environmental management which is needed to justify policy decisions to the public

the social value of hidden information in adverse selection economies abstract when agents possess imperfect hidden knowledge at the time contracts are negotiated the social value of agents having access to additional hidden knowledge before contracts are implemented is positive to the extent that incentive constrained agents are sorted more finely but is negative to the extent that incentive constraining agents impose more stringent signalling requirements on others hence the intuition developed by hirshleifer 1971 marshall 1974 and milgrom and stokey 1982 that privately acquired information has neither positive nor negative social value when agents possess no prior hidden knowledge does not apply when agents possess imperfect hidden knowledge during contractual negotiations

compensation of regional unemployment in housing markets why are regional unemployment differentials in europe so persistent if as the wage curve literature demonstrates there is no compensation in labour markets we hypothesize that workers in high unemployment regions are compensated in housing markets modelling regional unemployment differentials as a consequence of centralized wage bargaining we show that clearing of land markets may undo the incentive for workers to migrate to low unemployment regions in general equilibrium the compensating differentials hypothesis is tested on city level data for several countries controlling for variation in income and amenities housing is found to be about 3 percent less expensive on average in cities where unemployment is 10 percent up an analysis of housing demand survey data which takes account of housing heterogeneity yields a similar negative relationship the magnitude of the income effect generated by this compensating differential is consistent with a 0 10 wage curve elasticity these findings weaken the case for regional support programs

screening and adverse selection in frictional markets we develop a tractable framework for analyzing adverse selection economies with imperfect competition in our environment uninformed buyers offer a general menu of screening contracts to privately informed sellers some sellers receive offers from multiple buyers while others receive offers from only one buyer as in burdett and judd 1983 this specification allows us to smoothly vary the degree of competition nesting monopsony and perfect competition a la rothschild and stiglitz 1976 as special cases we show that the unique symmetric mixed strategy equilibrium exhibits a strict rank preserving property in that different types of sellers have an identical ranking over the various menus offered in equilibrium these menus can be all separating all pooling or a mixture of both depending on the distribution of types and the degree of competition in the market this calls into question the practice of using the incidence of separating contracts as evidence of adverse selection without controlling for market structure we examine the relationship between exante welfare and the degree of competition and show that in some cases an interior level of frictions maximizes welfare while in other cases competition is unambiguously bad for welfare finally we study the effects of various policy interventions such as disclosure and non discrimination requirements and show that our model generates new and perhaps counter intuitive insights

team production in competitive labor markets with adverse selection abstract team production is a frequent feature of modern organizations combined with team incentives team production can create externalities among workers since their utility upon accepting a contract depends on their team s performance and therefore on their colleagues productivity we study the effects of such externalities in a competitive labor market if workers have private information on their productivity we find that in any competitive equilibrium there must be pareto efficient separation of workers according to their productivity we further find that externalities facilitate equilibrium existence where under a particular condition on workers indifference curves even arbitrarily small externalities guarantee equilibrium existence