effect of remittances on poverty and financial development in sub saharan africa summary this paper assesses the effect of the steadily growing remittance flows to sub saharan africa though the region receives only a small portion of the total recorded remittances to developing countries and the volume of aid flows to sub saharan africa swamps remittances this paper finds that remittances which are a stable private transfer have a direct poverty mitigating effect and promote financial development these findings hold even after factoring in the reverse causality between remittances poverty and financial development the paper posits that formalizing such flows can serve as an effective access point for unbanked individuals and households

rainfall financial development and remittances evidence from sub saharan africa we use annual variations in rainfall to examine the effects that exogenous transitory income shocks have on remittances in a panel of 41 sub saharan african countries during the period 1970 2007 our main finding is that on average rainfall shocks have an insignificant contemporaneous effect on remittances however the marginal effect is significantly decreasing in the share of domestic credit to gdp so much so that at high levels of credit to gdp rainfall shocks have a significant negative effect on remittances while at low levels of credit to gdp the effect of rainfall on remittances is significantly positive

the efficiency of european regional banking w illiams j and g ardener e p m 2003 the efficiency of european regional banking reg studies 37 321 330 financial deregulation may segment european banking into pan national and regional tiers regional banking must finance productive investment to facilitate regional economic growth local banks are the appropriate financing vehicles because of their specialist knowledge of regional market risks and conditions employing stochastic frontier analysis the efficiency of regional banks in producing financial services is estimated along with the determinants of bank cost inefficiencies regional banks are found to be highly cost efficient with inefficiencies significantly correlated with bank liquidity competitiveness capitalization and organizational structure financial deregulation accompanies significant improvements in bank productivity whereas moves by banks towards industry best practice are positive but insignificant w illiams j et g ardener e p m 2003 l efficacite des operations

performance diversity and national identity evidence from association football the increasing national diversity of coworkers has no consensus on its impact on performance using a team s predominant nationality as a proxy for national diversity and national identity there is robust evidence that it affects team and individual performance detailed worker level data from a highly globalized industry association football show a nonlinear relationship between performance and the predominant nationality of a team s roster as the number of members from the predominant nationality increases performance declines however beyond a threshold level performance rises it follows that performance benefits from national diversity when the predominant nationality is small and from national identity when it is large jel m14 z21 z22 j15

is diversity good or bad evidence from esports teams analysis we use esports data to construct an empirical model to measure the effect of diversity on team performance different kinds of diversities are considered diversity of culture diversity of languag

a comparative study of efficiency in european banking this paper investigates whether there has been an improvement in and convergence of productive efficiency across european banking markets since the creation of the single internal market using efficiency measures derived from dea estimation the determinants of european bank efficiency are evaluated using the tobit regression model approach the established literature on modelling the determinants of bank efficiency is then extended by recognizing the problem of the inherent dependency of dea efficiency scores when used in regression analysis to overcome the dependency problem a bootstrapping technique is applied overall the results suggest that since the eu s single market programme there has been a small improvement in bank efficiency levels although there is little evidence to suggest that these have converged the results also suggest that inference on the determinants of bank efficiency drawn from non bootstrapped regression analysis may be biased and misleading

the finance growth nexus evidence from bank branch deregulation this paper provides evidence that financial markets can directly affect economic growth by studying the relaxation of bank branch restrictions in the united states we find that the rates of real per capita growth in income and output increase significantly following intrastate branch reform we also argue that the observed changes in growth are the result of changes in the banking system improvements in the quality of bank lending not increased volume of bank lending appear to be responsible for faster growth

peer pressure and partnerships partnerships and profit sharing are often claimed to motivate workers by giving them a share of the pie but in organizations of any significant size the free rider effects would seem to choke off

are women more attracted to co operation than men we conduct a real effort experiment where participants choose between individual compensation and team based pay in contrast to tournaments we find that women choose team based pay at least as frequently as men in all our conditions and significantly more often in a well defined subset of conditions women s greater attraction to co operative incentives results in part from their more optimistic assessments of their prospective teammate s ability women also respond differently to alternative rules for team formation in a manner that is consistent with advantageous inequity aversion in contrast men show a greater responsiveness to efficiency gains associated with team production

change point analysis of the growth effects of state banking deregulation this article uses recent developments in change point analysis to demonstrate thatstronger income growth rates previously associated with state bank branch deregu lation were in all cases temporary rather than permanent in addition patterns oftemporal ordering across regions suggest that in many states deregulation was a re sponse to economic conditions rather than the reverse jel e44 g28

rain and the democratic window of opportunity according to the economic approach to political transitions negative transitory economic shocks can give rise to a window of opportunity for democratic change we examine this hypothesis using yearly rainfall variation over the 1980 2004 period in 41 sub saharan african countries we find that a 25 drop in rainfall increases the probability of a transition to democracy during the following two years by around 3 percentage points a 5 fall in income due to low rainfall raises the probability of democratization by around 7 percentage points we also find that rainfall does not affect transitions from democracy to autocracy

migration diversity and economic growth when migrants move from one country to another they carry a new range of skills and perspectives which nurture technological innovation and stimulate economic growth at the same time increased heterogeneity may undermine social cohesion create coordination and communication barriers and adversely affect economic development in this article we investigate the extent to which cultural diversity affects economic growth and whether this relation depends on the level of development of a country we use novel data on bilateral migration stocks that is the number of people living and working outside the countries of their birth over the period 1960 2010 and compute indices of fractionalization and polarization in so doing we explore the effect of immigration on development through its effect on the composition of the destination country we find that overall both indices have a distinct positive impact on real gdp per capita and that the effect of diversity seems to be more consistent in developing countries

remittances and the dutch disease abstract using data for el salvador and bayesian techniques we develop and estimate a two sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of remittances on emerging market economies we find that whether altruistically motivated or otherwise an increase in remittance flows leads to a decline in labor supply and an increase in consumption demand that is biased toward non tradables the higher non tradable prices serve as incentive for an expansion of that sector culminating in reallocation of labor away from the tradable sector a phenomenon known as the dutch disease quantitative results also indicate that remittances improve the welfare of households because they smooth income flows and increase consumption and leisure levels a bvar analysis provides results that are consistent with the dynamics of the model

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

regional growth and finance in europe is there a quality effect of bank efficiency abstract in this study we test whether regional growth in 11 european countries depends on financial development and suggest the use of cost and profit efficiency estimates as quality measures of financial institutions contrary to the usual quantitative proxies of financial development the quality of financial institutions is measured in this study as the relative ability of banks to intermediate funds an improvement in bank efficiency spurs five times more regional growth then an identical increase in credit does more credit provided by efficient banks exerts an independent growth effect in addition to direct quantity and quality channel effects

cooperation and competition in intergenerational experiments in the field and the laboratory there is economic pressure towards the postponement of the retirement age but employers are still reluctant to employ older workers we investigate the comparative behavior of juniors and seniors in experiments conducted both onsite with the employees of two large firms and in a conventional laboratory environment with students and retirees we show that seniors are no more risk averse than juniors and are typically more cooperative both juniors and working seniors respond strongly to competition the implication is that it may be beneficial to define additional incentives near the end of the career to motivate and retain older workers

remittances financial development and growth abstract despite the increasing importance of remittances in total international capital flows the relationship between remittances and growth has not been adequately studied this paper studies one of the links between remittances and growth in particular how local financial sector development influences a country s capacity to take advantage of remittances using a newly constructed dataset for remittances covering about 100 developing countries we find that remittances boost growth in countries with less developed financial systems by providing an alternative way to finance investment and helping overcome liquidity constraints this finding controls for the endogeneity of remittances and financial development does not depend on the particular measure of financial sector development used and is robust to a number of robustness tests including threshold estimation we also provide evidence that there could be an investment channel trough which remittances can promote growth especially when the financial sector does not meet the credit needs of the population

rich regions poor regions and bank branch deregulation in spain abstractrich regions poor regions and bank branch deregulation in spain regional studies the links between financial deregulation and economic performance are evaluated in a european context specifically the study analyses the relaxation of bank branching restrictions in spain which triggered a remarkable interregional expansion of savings banks that coincided with an unprecedented period of sustained economic expansion although related questions have been widely investigated for the united states experiences in europe have received far less research attention an additional contribution of the paper lies in its use of quantile regression which enables the investigation of the possibility of economic effects taking into account the degree of regional development the potential endogeneity of some of the regressors is also explicitly considered results do not support the case for a positive effect of bank branch deregulation in spain out of region entry in particular does not seem to have had

face to face communication in organizations communication is integral to organizations and yet field evidence on the relation between communication and worker productivity remains scarce we argue that a core role of communication is to transmit information that helps co workers do their job better we build a simple model in which workers choose the amount of communication by trading off this benefit against the time cost incurred by the sender and use it to derive a set of empirical predictions we then exploit a natural experiment in an organization where problems arrive and must be sequentially dealt with by two workers for exogenous reasons the first worker can sometimes communicate face to face with their colleague consistently with the predictions of our model we find that 1 the second worker works faster at the cost of the first worker having less time to deal with incoming problems when face to face communication is possible 2 this effect is stronger when the second worker is busier and for homogenous and closely located teams and 3 the career incentives of workers determine how much they communicate with their colleagues we also find that workers partially internalise social outcomes in their communication decisions our findings illustrate how workers in teams adjust the amount of mutual communication to its costs and benefits

cities and cultures we investigate whether cultural diversity across us cities measured as the variety of native languages spoken by city residents is associated with any effect on their productivity diversity of cultures may imply diversity of production skills of abilities and of occupations that enhances the productive performance of a city on the other hand transaction costs and frictions across groups may hurt productivity similarly diversity in available goods and services can increase utility but distaste for or hostility to different cultural groups may decrease it using census data from 1970 to 1990 we find that wages and employment density of us born workers were systematically higher ceteris paribus in cities with richer linguistic diversity these positive correlations reveal a net positive effect of diversity on productivity that survives robustness checks and instrumental variable estimation this effect is found to be stronger for highly educated workers and for white workers we also show that better assimilated non native speakers i e those who speak english well and have been in the us for more than five years are most beneficial to the productivity of us born workers

surviving andersonville the benefits of social networks in pow camps twenty seven percent of the union army prisoners captured july 1863 or later died in captivity at andersonville the death rate may have been as high as 40 percent how did men survive such horrific conditions using two independent datasets we find that friends had a statistically significant positive effect on survival probabilities and that the closer the ties between friends as measured by such identifiers as ethnicity kinship and the same hometown the bigger was the impact of friends on survival probabilities jel n41 z13

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

racial realism a review essay on john skrentny s after civil rights in his valuable contribution after civil rights john skrentny shows that in many sectors of the labor market race is used in ways that were unanticipated when the 1964 civil rights act was enacted with separate chapters on the professions and business the public sector media and entertainment and the low skill market he demonstrates that the new racial realism is widespread generally has some justification from social scientific research and is usually inconsistent with judicial decisions i review the racially realistic practices racial matching increasing diversity racial signaling and racial characteristics and discuss their implications for labor economics and for policy

reaching out access to and use of banking services across countries the authors 1 present new indicators of banking sector penetration across 99 countries based on a survey of bank regulatory authorities 2 show that these indicators predict household and firm use of banking services 3 explore the association between the outreach indicators and measures of financial institutional and infrastructure development across countries and 4 relate these banking outreach indicators to measures of firms financing constraints in particular they find that greater outreach is correlated with standard measures of financial development as well as with economic activity controlling for these factors the authors find that better communication and transport infrastructure and better governance are also associated with greater outreach government ownership of financial institutions translates into lower access while more concentrated banking systems are associated with greater outreach finally firms in countries with higher branch and atm penetration and higher use of loan services report lower financing obstacles thus linking banking sector outreach to the alleviation of firms financing constraints

remittances transaction costs and informality abstract recorded workers remittances to developing countries reached 167 billion in 2005 bringing increasing attention to these flows as a potential tool for development in this paper we explore the determinants of remittances and their associated transaction costs we find that recorded remittances depend positively on the stock of migrants and negatively on transfer costs and exchange rate restrictions in turn transfer costs are lower when financial systems are more developed and exchange rates less volatile the negative impact of transactions costs on remittances suggests that migrants either refrain from sending money home or else remit through informal channels when costs are high we provide evidence from household surveys supportive of a sizeable informal sector

international migration workers remittances and permanent income hypothesis summary studies that examine the long run impact of remittances on economic growth in west africa and the caribbean show that remittances are not growth enhancing money has been used toward consumption rather than investment because migrants from these regions are mostly permanent immigrants who settle in the host countries we ask if there is a difference for south asia where migrant workers are flooding for short term temporary contracts in the middle eastern countries the permanent income hypothesis states that a permanent increase in income raises current consumption while transitory income increase is saved or smoothed over a life time we argue that the transitory income remitted by short term migrants is invested to generate future income when they return we examine a panel data of five south asian countries bangladesh india nepal pakistan and sri lanka for a period from 1975 to 2011 using panel cointegration and pooled mean group pmg estimation of dynamic heterogeneous panels we show that there is a long run significant impact of workers remittances on income while the impact on consumption is not significant a one percent increase in remittance receipt per person raises per capita income by approximately 0 23 the results are robust across different tests

the effects of coworker heterogeneity on firm level output assessing the impacts of cultural and language diversity in the national hockey league this paper uses data from the national hockey league nhl to consider the potential gains to firms from employing culturally diverse work teams it finds that the presence of foreign workers does increase firm level performance nhl teams that employed a higher proportion of european players performed better however the results also indicate that teams perform better when their european players come from the same country rather than being spread across many european countries when teams have players from a wide array of european countries integration costs associated with language and cultural differences may start to over ride any gains from diversity

exporting creative and cultural products birthplace diversity matters this paper analyses the effect of birthplace diversity on exports of creative and cultural goods for 19 oecd countries over the period 1990 2010 by matching unesco s creative and cultural exports classification to trade and migration data we find a strong positive effect of birthplace diversity on the export of creative products in particular a 10 increase in the birthplace diversity index implies a 4 increase in creative goods exports these results are robust across several specifications and shed light on a potential new channel through which migrants can contribute to the host country s export performance it is interesting to note that only diversity of secondary and tertiary educated immigrants contributes to an increase in exports of creative and cultural goods an instrumental variables approach addresses the potential endogeneity problems and confirms our results

revisiting the threshold effect of remittances on total factor productivity growth in south asia a study of bangladesh and india abstractboth bangladesh and india are among the top recipient of remittances in absolute terms however in relative terms remittances as a per cent of gdp the two countries stand at 6 1 and 2

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

winners or losers the effects of banking consolidation on corporate borrowers we estimate the impact of bank mergers and acquisitions m as on outstanding credit credit lines and the sensitivity of investment to cash flow using a large sample of italian corporate borrowers we distinguish between firms that experienced relationship termination as a consequence of bank m as and those that did not our findings are consistent with bank m as having an adverse effect on credit particularly when the m a is followed by relationship termination the effect persists 3 years and then is absorbed suggesting that firms are able to compensate for the negative shock in the past decade many countries experienced a wave of mergers and acquisitions m as that profoundly modified the structure of their banking industries group of ten 2001 one of the key questions that has emerged in the academic and policy debates is what the consequences of m as are for bank borrowers the empirical literature on bank m as studies extensively the effects of consolidation on bank performance and local market conditions particularly in terms of efficiency and market power see berger demsetz and strahan

access to finance an unfinished agenda recent data compilations show that many poor and non poor people in many developing countries face a high degree of financial exclusion and high barriers in access to finance theory and empirical evidence point to the critical role that improved access to finance has in promoting growth and reducing income inequality an extensive literature shows the channels through which finance promotes enterprise growth and improves aggregate resource allocation there is less evidence at the household level however and on the effectiveness of policies to overcome financial exclusion the article summarizes recent efforts to measure and analyze the impact of access to finance and discusses the unfinished research agenda

remittances and financial development empirical evidence from heterogeneous panel of countries remittances are the second largest source of external finance after foreign direct investment in the developing economies in this study we analyse the role of incoming remittances on financial de

internationalization and financial federalism the united states and germany at the crossroads in this article the authors examine some effects of economic internationalization on state structures especially in regard to the distribution of power and authority within federalist systems us

commercial lending and distance evidence from community reinvestment act data a number of large banking organizations have substantially broadened the distances at which they are willing to extend commercial loans but there is also evidence to suggest that this has occurred primarily at the high side of the distribution of lending distances in this paper we employ a new source of data to examine the relationship between lending decisions and distance between lender and borrower for that part of the distance distribution where arguably most of the competitive interactions among lenders still occur we report three basic findings 1 distance operates as a deterrent to lending even within areas traditionally defined as local markets 2 distance is more of a deterrent for small banks than for larger organizations even within these areas and 3 for those commercial loans made within areas currently treated by regulators as markets distance has not been declining in importance indeed a preponderance of the evidence suggests that it is becoming if anything more of a factor possible explanations and policy implications are discussed

an empirical analysis of remittance flows into west african economic and monetary union a panel time series approach abstractthe article empirically analyses the motivations and long run economic outcomes of remittance inflows into the west african economic and monetary union using westerlund s 2007 ecm for panel time series and data spanning 1975 2011 the results show that there is no evidence of a long run impact of remittances on income per capita in the region the inflows seem to be motivated by investment but the money may be used to promote consumption instead this phenomenon could be characterized by information asymmetry between migrants and the recipients

financial innovations in banking impact on regional growth carbo valverde s lopez del paso r and rodriguez fernandez f 2007 financial innovations in banking impact on regional growth regional studies 41 311 326 this paper contributes to the literature on the relationship between finance and growth by analysing the relationships between financial intermediation and economic growth within the regions of one country rather than with different countries the focus on regions is relevant since regional information is more homogeneous the legal and institutional factors are similar and the relevant financial market is more accurately defined the study also incorporates the effects of a set of banking innovations the analysis is undertaken for the spanish regions the results show that product and service delivery innovations contribute positively to regional gross domestic product investment and gross savings growth carbo valverde s lopez del paso r et rodriguez fernandez f 2007 les innovations financieres dans le secteur bancaire l impact sur l

the heterogeneity of immigrants host countries income and productivity a channel accounting approach this article exploits changes in the distribution of immigrants across 20 organization for economic co operation and development countries from 1960 to 2005 in order to assess their contribution to income of destination countries the non random sorting of immigrants across countries is addressed by using an instrumental variable strategy the instrument is built by estimating a bilateral migration model incorporating exogenous origin country determinants of migration aggregate results reveal that immigrants have a positive effect on income that works primarily through total factor productivity tfp we further construct a novel dataset from censuses and labor force surveys to explore the information on the age of immigrants contrasting income effects are found across age groups a higher share of immigrants among the youth has a negative impact on aggregate income while a higher share of immigrants among prime aged workers has a positive effect we interpret this disparity as short term versus medium term effects adjustments over time involve changes in tfp but also in the human capital of the native born jel f22 j24 j31 o31

how do remittances affect human capital formation of school age boys and girls we revisit the impact of remittances on educational attainment of school age children in nepal paying particular attention to differences between girls and boys a heightened interest in understanding the impact of remitting practices on a variety of economic variables has emerged as remittances to developing countries continue to rise in nepal the world bank reports that remittances amounted to 1 2 billion us dollars in 2005 while gdp was 8 2 billion and official development assistance totaled 425 million world bank 2007 we use the 1995 1996 nepal living standards survey nlss to examine the impact of remittances on human capital investments for female and male children if remittances do affect human capital positively then not only will remittances affect long run growth in nepal but the opportunities for women in nepal should improve as the female population becomes more educated the effect of remittances on human capital investment is unclear a priori increasing income through remittances may increase investment in children s schooling by relaxing household budget and capital constraints conversely household absenteeism pressures children to work in the home reducing time for education our data provide an opportunity to separate the effect of household disruption from the income effect of remittances on the decision to invest in schooling we are able to measure the number of adults living outside the household so that we may control for absenteeism in estimating the impact of remittances on household schooling choices we ask if the impact varies by gender and age group young child versus older child our results indicate that young children benefit more from remittances but the benefits controlling how do remittances affect human capital formation of school age boys and girls

trends in rainfall and economic growth in africa a neglected cause of the african growth tragedy abstract we examine the role of rainfall trends in poor growth performance of sub saharan african nations relative to other developing countries using a new cross country panel climatic data set in an empirical economic growth framework our results show that rainfall has been a significant determinant of poor economic growth for african nations but not for other countries depending on the benchmark measure of potential rainfall we estimate that the direct impact under the scenario of no decline in rainfall would have resulted in a reduction of between around 15 and 40 of today s gap in african gdp per capita relative to the rest of the developing world

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

why countries differ in thin capitalization rules the role of financial development abstract the purpose of thin capitalization rules is to limit multinational firms possibilities of engaging in tax planning via debt shifting this paper analyzes the optimal design of thin capitalization rules in the presence of financial frictions when a host country in the first stage chooses the type of thin capitalization rule and then in the second stage decides about the strictness we show that welfare under a safe haven rule is higher than under an earnings stripping rule if firms are not able to manipulate the interest rate on internal loans welfare however can be higher under an earnings stripping rule if firms are able to manipulate the interest rate on internal loans we also show that the optimal level of internal interest deductions decreases with the financial development of the host country our results are consistent with countries actual policy choice

globalisation and the market for team mates the globalisation of firms is explored at theoretical and empirical levels the idea is that a global firm is a multi cultural team the existence of a global firm is somewhat puzzling combining workers who have different cultures legal systems and languages imposes costs on the firm that would not be present were all workers to conform to one standard in order to offset the costs of cross cultural dealing there must be complementarities between the workers that are sufficiently important to overcome the costs the search for the best practice is analysed and empirical support from an examination of trading patterns is provided

tools or toys the impact of high technology on scholarly productivity i introduction and motivation in the past several decades investment that makes communication easier has increased rapidly in the united states and other developed economies since the mid 1980s a combination of technical change and deregulation has also reduced long distance telephone rates in the united states by 50 reported by allen 1995 pitney bowes 1997 reported that fax usage increased by 20 between 1996 and 1997 alone and electronic mail e mail unknown before 1985 is ubiquitous today popular discussion of a wide range of additional examples of rapidly declining prices and explosive growth of the use of telecommunications is provided by cairncross 1997 attempts to measure the impact on aggregate total factor and labor productivity of these supposedly productivity enhancing investments in broad reaching technical improvements such as computing machinery and communications equipment have not met with great success as in morrison 1997 but see greenan and mairesse 1996 1 an alternative to measuring effects on the broader economy is to measure the impact of generalized technical change on productivity in specific activities observed at the micro level an earlier literature including griliches 1958 and trajtenberg 1989 has clearly traced the effect of specific innovations in raising productivity in specific sectors of the economy this article expands on that tradition by trying to identify the effect of the recent broad revolution in communications on one activity scholarly publishing we propose studying scholarly publishing before and after technical change greatly lowered communication costs we examine in particular whether increasing ease of communication has altered scholars choices about their methods of production and whether those methods yielded changes in the productivity of scholarly activity that are consistent with increasing access to new communications technologies 2 in section ii we discuss a model of the production process in scholarly writing in relation to the cost of communications in section iii we describe the unique data set we assembled to examine the relation between technical change and scholarly productivity section iv presents the results of using these data to test the hypotheses that we develop and section v compares coauthored to solo authored studies and provides a suggestion for the increased prevalence of the former section vi offers a consistent explanation for most of the results ii a model of scholarly production the example that we use in this study of the impact of technology is the nature and outcomes of the choices of co workers by authors of scholarly publications in economics the importance of team research has been stressed by a number of authors studying the economics of innovation including dasgupta 1988 who also presents a research summary so that our specific example has broader implications for the study of technical change has the decline in the cost of communication altered scholars choices in a way consistent with these technologies increasing scholarly productivity in examining scholarly productivity we focus on research output in particular we view scholars as having three production choices 1 work solo s 2 work with close by coauthor s c or 3 work with distant coauthor s d in the model in this section the scholar is assumed to choose a production technology that maximizes his or her scholarly productivity measured as the quality of the article produced in section vi we a dopt an alternative characterization of a scholar s choices we assume that the scholar has a wide range of potential research activities to choose among and has perfect knowledge of the productivity p valued in dollars of all potential matches s c sub i member of c and d sub i member of d 3 each match generates one solo equivalent article per period

are workers willing to pay to join a better team using data from the major league baseball free agent market this study is the first to show that the productivity expected of the team a worker will join produces a significant negative compensating wage differential the younger workers in the sample drive this result trading 25 of their wages to join teams with an expected productivity one standard deviation higher this investment can be recouped if a reasonable increase in human capital occurs these results are robust to contract length wage simultaneity and indicate that investment in human capital motivates the observed tradeoff suggesting a new pathway through which human capital accumulation can affect wages reliable measures of workers own past productivity and the productivity expected of a worker s future team provide key advantages to identifying these effects jel j31 j24 m54

explaining efficiency differences among large german and austrian banks cost efficiency scale efficiency and productivity change are estimated by data envelopment analysis and cost efficiency is regressed on explanatory variables no evidence is found for average productivity responding to deregulation over the period studied state owned banks are found to be more cost efficient likely owing to cheaper funds and cooperative banks to be about as cost efficient as private banks increasing economies of scale but decreasing economies of scope provide rationale for m as among banks with similar product portfolios interbank and capital market funding is found to be more cost efficient than deposits when the cost of retail networks is controlled

remittance inflows and financial development evidence from the top recipient countries in sub saharan africa this paper utilizes a panel cointegration approach to investigate the relationship between remittances and financial development in the top remittance recipient countries in sub saharan africa our

regional financial development and bank competition effects on firms growth fernandez de guevara j and maudos j regional financial development and bank competition effects on firms growth regional studies this paper analyses the effect of regional financial development and bank competition on firms growth using the spanish provinces as a testing ground the results show that firms in industries with a greater dependence on external finance grow faster in more financially developed provinces the results also show that bank monopoly power has an inverted u effect on firms growth suggesting that market power has its highest effect at intermediate values the effect is heterogeneous among firms according to the financial dependence of the industry to which they belong this result is consistent with the literature on relationship banking which argues that bank competition can have a negative effect on the availability of finance for more informationally opaque firms fernandez de guevara j et maudos j le developpement financier regional et la concurrence bancaire l imp

the impact of ethnic diversity in bureaucracies evidence from the nigerian civil service the authors document the correlation between the workplace diversity of bureaucracies and public services delivered the authors do so in the context of the federal civil service in nigeria the most important government bureaucracy operating in a highly ethnically fractionalized society in which ethnicity is a salient form of identity the authors provide novel evidence extending the empirical literature along all three margins in the context of nigeria the authors document the relationship between public service delivery and the ethnic diversity of civil service organizations the impact of bureaucratic diversity on public service delivery in this context is not obvious the analysis begins to shed light on whether the positive channels through which diversity operates as stressed in the management literature for example increased skill complementary of workers in the production function dominate the negative channels through which diversity may operate as stressed in the macro literature for example divisions in preferences free riding on other groups contributions ineffective social sanctions etc understanding the role of diversity in government bureaucracies is important because as the state capacity literature has emphasized the effective functioning of government bureaucracy matters for poverty inequality and economic growth the authors build on that analysis to examine the relevance of a key feature of nigerian society that it is highly ethnically fractionalized

the growing importance of social skills in the labor market the labor market increasingly rewards social skills between 1980 and 2012 jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the u s labor force math intensive but less social jobs including many stem occupations shrank by 3 3 percentage points over the same period employment and wage growth were particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills to understand these patterns i develop a model of team production where workers trade tasks to exploit their comparative advantage in the model social skills reduce coordination costs allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently the model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations which i investigate using data from the nlsy79 and the nlsy97 using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves i find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid 1980s and 1990s

integration and competition in the european financial markets abstract financial integration in europe should affect the competition between markets and intermediaries and generate a convergence of both interest rates and margins among different countries this paper analyzes both the evolution of the convergence in interest rates and the level of competition and its inequalities among the european banking systems for the period 1993 2001 the inequality index used the theil index allows us to break down the inequalities into a country and a specialization effect if the former effect dominates it would mean that national banking markets are segmented due to the existence of obstacles or barriers to integration on the other hand dominance of the latter effect would be related to the different level of competition depending on the type of banking specialization

are remittances insurance evidence from rainfall shocks in the philippines several facts motivate this study first life in developing countries is prone to many kinds of risk such as crop and income loss due to natural disasters weather insect infestations and fire and civil conflict second international migration and remittance flows are substantial and growing between 1965 and 2000 individuals living outside their country of birth grew from 2 2 to 2 9 percent of the world population totaling 175 million people in 2000 the remittances that these migrants send to their countries of origin are an important but poorly understood type of international financial flow this article examines a mechanism for coping with shocks ex post on which previous micro level studies have not focused remittances from family members overseas at the international level it is commonly posited that remittance flows from overseas buffer economic shocks in migrants home countries but there have been relatively few empirical tests of this claim with micro level household data related research on the role of domestic migration in pooling risk within extended families includes lucas and stark 1985 rosenzweig and stark 1989 and paulson 2000

does local financial development matter we study the effects of differences in local financial development within an integrated financial market we construct a new indicator of financial development by estimating a regional effect on the probability that ceteris paribus a household is shut off from the credit market by using this indicator we find that financial development enhances the probability an individual starts his own business favors entry of new firms increases competition and promotes growth as predicted by theory these effects are weaker for larger firms which can more easily raise funds outside of the local area these effects are present even when we instrument our indicator with the structure of the local banking markets in 1936 which because of regulatory reasons affected the supply of credit in the following 50 years overall the results suggest local financial development is an important determinant of the economic success of an area even in an environment where there are no frictions to capital movements

cultural differences and capability transfer in cross border acquisitions the mediating roles of capability complementarity absorptive capacity and social integration this paper presents an integrative model of the impact of cultural differences on capability transfer in cross border acquisitions we propose that cultural differences affect the post acquisition capability transfer through their impact on social integration potential absorptive capacity and capability complementarity two dynamic variables the use of social integration mechanisms and the degree of operational integration of the acquired unit are proposed to moderate the effects of cultural differences on social integration and potential absorptive capacity the implications for acquisition research and practice are discussed

bank office outreach structure and performance in regional banking markets burgstaller j bank office outreach structure and performance in regional banking markets regional studies this paper studies bank penetration market structure and banking conduct across austrian districts neither differences in market concentration nor in the activity of out of market banks can explain the regional dispersion of interest rates bank profitability and efficiency a higher bank density is connected to more competition and lower mark ups and indicates more efficient banking markets as well as efficiency is the main determinant of bank profits and competition seems to be mildly indicative of stronger regional growth the preservation of a fair regional bank outreach appears to be an important policy target burgstaller j burgstaller j le rayon d action des guichets ban

the changing structure of local credit markets are small businesses special abstract in many countries consolidation in the banking industry has reduced the number of small banks and led to significant shifts in market shares deregulation has fostered entry in local credit markets and the expansion of branch networks increasing competition in local markets small businesses are believed to be more vulnerable to these changes since they are more dependent on credit from local banks in this paper we investigate the consequences of consolidation and entry for these borrowers compared with those for large firms we employ a data set for italy which provides information on volumes of loans and bad loans by size of borrower with a detailed geographical partition we find that mergers are followed by a temporary reduction in outstanding credit to all sizes of borrowers and by an increase in bad loans most likely due to the reassessment of banks portfolios entry has a relatively persistent negative impact on credit supply to small and medium sized firms our results also show that concentration branch density and the share of branches of small banks affect the volumes of credit and bad loans of small borrowers