the drivers of international migration to the uk a panel based bayesian model averaging approach a heterogeneous panel based bayesian model averaging approach is used to identify the robust economic and policy drivers of international migration to the uk from 14 different source regions over 1980 2007 around three quarters of the increase in net immigration over the last decade which is particularly pronounced for selected source regions is associated with structural change which may be attributed to uk and foreign immigration policy the remainder of the rise is largely explained by friends and family effects there are considerable uncertainties associated both with the effects of particular economic drivers of immigration and with forecasts of immigration

pricing in a customer market in standard pricing models movements in demand are partially offset by price responses in a customer market however price markups may decrease with high demand thus price may magnify rather than stabilize demand movements i consider a monopolist selling a good of which first time consumers are uncertain repeat customers know that the product works the monopolist trades the objectives of exploiting past customers and attracting new ones in a period with many new potential customers the monopolist gives more weight to attracting and lowers its markup last i examine some evidence on whether expansions are periods with disproportionately many new customers

what have we learned since hotelling s letter a meta analysis abstract this paper reports the results of a meta analysis of the estimates of the price elasticity of demand for recreation sites using the travel cost method by using econometric methods to summarize empirical literature meta analysis assists in identifying research conclusions despite the non experimental nature of most empirical research in economics in this application the results suggest that modeling decisions based on theory as well as those relying on fitting criteria were important influences to the estimated price elasticities across studies

welfare payments and other economic determinants of female migration this article investigates the effects of welfare payments wages and unemployment on women s probability of interstate migration in the united states it also investigates if the income attraction of locations varies with recency of labor market experience welfare gains increase the probability of interstate migration welfare effects are largest for single mothers with small children and stronger among women with no recent labor market experience the welfare effects albeit small are larger than the wage effects the wage effects are weaker among women with no recent work experience ethnic specific analyses suggest differences in migration behavior among anglos african americans and puerto ricans

micro and macro elasticities in a life cycle model with taxes we build a life cycle model of labor supply that incorporates changes along both the intensive and extensive margin and use it to assess the consequences of changes in tax and transfer policies on equilibrium hours of work we find that changes in taxes have large aggregate effects on hours of work moreover we find that there is no inconsistency between this result and the empirical finding of small labor elasticities for prime age workers in our model micro and macro elasticities are effectively unrelated our model is also consistent with other cross country patterns

a meta analytical evaluation of sustainable city initiatives the role of the city in environmental management is increasingly coming to the fore a central element in creating urban environmental sustainability is the adoption of appropriate energy policies since most environmental externalities in cities are directly or indirectly related to energy use the current practice demonstrates an overwhelming variety of initiatives and policies so that the actual success of such strategies in a cross sectional comparative perspective is hard to evaluate in this context this paper offers an application of meta analysis as this approach is an interesting analytical contribution towards a better understanding of the critical success factors of urban energy policies the paper starts with a general overview of the issue of urban sustainability and sets out the importance of energy policies at the urban level it continues by offering a methodological framework for the assessment of critical factors related to the performance of sustainable energy strategies using a dat

migrations risks and uncertainty a field experiment in china abstract we report data from the first incentivized artefactual field experiment conducted in china to understand whether chinese migrants differ from non migrants in terms of preferences regarding risk and uncertainty in various contexts we find that compared to non migrants migrants are significantly more likely to enter competitions when they expect competitive entries from others however migrants are not different from non migrants in risk and ambiguity preferences where strategic uncertainty is absent our results suggest that migration may be driven more by a stronger belief in one s chance of succeeding in an uncertain competitive environment than by differences risk attitudes related to state uncertainty

fear unemployment and migration we examine the impact on the uk economy of the flow of workers from ten east european countries after their accession to the european union we find evidence that those most susceptible to competition from these workers have seen weaker wage inflation we document that the presence of these foreign workers has increased the fear of unemployment and helped to contain wage pressure we argue that this inflow of workers has increased supply by more than it has raised demand and thus had the effect of reducing both inflationary pressures and the natural rate of unemployment the recent rise in migration to the uk from eight eu accession countries the czech republic estonia hungary latvia lithuania poland slovakia and slovenia the a8 countries which started in 2004 as well as subsequently from romania and bulgaria the a2 in 2007 has generated a good deal of controversy we will refer to these countries collectively as the a10 henceforth 1 how many of these eastern europeans are there currently in the uk which countries did they come from and when what impact has their influx had on the uk economy and what likely impacts will they have in the future

demographic differences in cyclical employment variation demographic differences in patterns of employment variation over the business cycle are examined in this paper three primary conclusions emerge first both participation and unemployment must be considered in any analysis of cyclical changes in the labor market second young people bear a disproportionate share of cyclical employment variation third failure to consider participation has led to undue pessimism about the effect of aggregate demand policy on high unemployment groups if participation did not surge reduction in overall unemployment to its 1969 level would reduce the unemployment of almost all demographic groups to very low levels

learning by doing vs learning about match quality can we tell them apart understanding the accumulation of match specific capital is crucial in shedding light on the reasons for the prevalence of long term employ ment relationships and on the welfare consequences of turnover in the labor market one of the most important source of match specific capital is human capital acquired through match specific learning such learn ing can take on two distinct forms in the first case workers accumulate match specific human capital through learning by doing in the second case a worker and a firm in an employment relationship learn about the quality of the match over time thereby acquiring valuable information i construct a structural model that embeds these two learning explana tions i show that it is possible to distinguish the two explanations given turnover data on employing firms coupled with data on workers such data now exist in the form of matched employer employee data sets i use a matched french data set to estimate the structural model using the efficient method of moments a simulation based estimation method i find that while learning by doing could be present in the first few months of an employment relationship learning about match quality dominates at tenures above half a year this finding has important consequences for economists understanding of the sources of match specific capital and for the desirability of policies that alter the incentives for turnover for workers of different tenure

do contingent valuation estimates pass a scope test a meta analysis abstract this paper considers the scope test proposed to judge the internal consistency of contingent valuation estimates the test is shown to be quite sensitive to the maintained hypotheses required to derive fairly precise expectations for the properties of wtp functions and therefore a different approach may be needed in gauging the reliability of cv this paper describes an approach that relies on a weight of the evidence criterion and uses meta analysis to develop a systematic appraisal of what the economic values of changes in amenity resources are the approach is illustrated for the case of estimating people s willingness to pay for improving or maintaining visibility at the national parks

aggregate fluctuations and international migration this paper studies the role of short run factors such as business cycles or changes in employment rates in explaining international migration flows we first derive a model of optimal migration choice predicting that short run economic fluctuations may trigger migration flows on top of the impact exerted by long run factors second we empirically test the magnitude of the effect of these short run factors on migration flows our results indicate that aggregate fluctuations and employment rates both affect migration flows third we provide evidence that the schengen agreement and the euro significantly raised the international mobility of workers between the member countries this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

current real business cycle theories and aggregate labor market fluctuations hours worked and the return to working are weakly correlated traditionally the ability to account for this fact has been a litmus test for macroeconomic models existing real business cycle models fail this test dramatically we modify prototypical real business cycle models by allowing government consumption shocks to influence labor market dynamics this modification can in principle bring the models into closer conformity with the data our empirical results indicate that it does

multilateral resistance to migration the rate of migration observed between two countries does not depend solely on their relative attractiveness but also on the one of alternative destinations following the trade literature we term the influence exerted by other destinations on bilateral flows as multilateral resistance to migration and we show how it can be accounted for when estimating the determinants of migration rates in the context of a general individual random utility maximization model we propose the use of the common correlated effects estimator pesaran 2006 and apply it to high frequency data on the spanish immigration boom between 1997 and 2009 compared to more restrictive estimation strategies developed in the literature the bias goes in the expected direction we find a smaller effect of gdp per capita and a larger effect of migration policies on bilateral rates

bilateral real exchange rates and migration abstractmigrants who move across borders are to a large extent motivated by the prospect of earning higher incomes at destination which can be partly transferred back to their countries of origin via remittances this suggests that the real exchange rate can influence the incentives to migrate as it determines the purchasing power of expected income in terms of the currency of the origin country this article investigates empirically how bilateral real exchange rate fluctuations influence international migration flows to do so we build a dataset of 30 oecd destination countries and 165 origin countries over the period 1980 2011 and estimate an equation derived from a micro founded random utility maximization model that allows for unobserved heterogeneity between migrants and non migrants our results show that migration flows are highly responsive to bilateral real exchange rates a 10 real appreciation of the currency of the destination country is associated with an 18 2 19 4 increase in migratio

signals or noise explaining the variation in recreation benefit estimates this paper uses meta analysis to summarize the benefit estimates derived from travel cost recreation demand models after reviewing approximately 200 published and unpublished studies prepared from 1970 to 1986 77 were found to report either consumer surplus estimates or sufficient information to derive them using these estimates of the consumer surplus per unit of use from each study it was possible to evaluate the influence of variables describing the site characteristics the activities undertaken at each site the behavioral assumptions and the specification decisions the findings provide clear support for using econometric methods to summarize results from diverse empirical studies they highlight the important research issues in model development and offer a consistency check to the procedures used in benefit transfer analyses for policy evaluations

migration with endogenous moving costs we study a dynamic model of labor migration in which moving costs decrease with the number of migrants already settled in the destination this assumption is supported by sociological studies of migrant networks with endogenous moving costs migration occurs gradually over time once it starts it develops momentum and migratory flows may increase even as wage differentials narrow in addition migration tends to follow geographical channels and low moving cost individuals migrate first these patterns are consistent with historical evidence from the great black migration of 1915 1960 in the united states much of which cannot be reconciled with existing migration models excerpt

household search and the aggregate labor market we develop a theoretical model with labour market frictions incomplete financial markets and with households which have two members households face unemployment risks but their members adjust their labour supplies to insure against unemployment we use the model to explain the cyclical properties of aggregate employment and participation as in the u s data the model predicts that the participation rate the fraction of individuals that want jobs is not strongly correlated with aggregate economic activity this property is in sharp contrast to the strongly procyclical participation predicted by both neoclassical models and models with search frictions when we assume bachelor households or households with infinitely many members complete markets in the two member household model and in the data primary earners are always in the labour force secondary earners have a mildly countercyclical participation rate and a mildly procyclical employment rate their behaviour insures the household against unemployment risks

the demand for youth explaining age differences in the volatility of hours over the business cycle young workers experience much greater volatility of hours worked than prime aged workers this can arise from age differences in labor supply or labor demand characteristics to distinguish between these we document that for young workers both the cyclical volatilities of hours and wages are greater than those of the prime aged we argue that a general class of models featuring only age specific labor supply differences cannot reconcile these facts we then show that a simple model featuring labor demand differences can

selection and network effects migration flows into oecd countries 1990 2000 abstract this paper presents empirical evidence on immigration flows into the oecd countries during the period 1990 2000 our results indicate that network effects are strong but vary between different groups of welfare states and between countries according to the type of immigration policy being applied network effects seem to be less important in the nordic countries which also seem to attract immigrants from the lowest income level source countries we do not find clear evidence that selection effects measured by migration flows being sensitive to differences in public social expenditures have had a major influence on the observed migration patterns until now this may partly be explained by restrictive migration policies which may have dampened the potential selection effects

business cycle fluctuations and the life cycle how important is on the job skill accumulation abstract we study the effects of on the job skill accumulation on average hours worked by age and the volatility of hours over the life cycle in a calibrated general equilibrium model two forms of skill accumulation are considered learning by doing and on the job training in our economy with learning by doing individuals supply more labor early in the life cycle and less as they approach retirement than they do in an economy without this feature the impact of this feature on the volatility of hours over the life cycle depends on the value of the intertemporal elasticity of labor supply when individuals accumulate skills by on the job training there are only weak effects on both the steady state labor supply and its volatility over the life cycle

factor hoarding and the propagation of business cycles shocks this paper analyzes the role of variable capital utilization rates in propagating shocks over the business cycle to this end we formulate and estimate an equilibrium business cycle model in which cyclical capital utilization rates are viewed as a form of factor hoarding we find that variable capital utilization rates substantially magnify and propagate the impact of shocks to agents environments the strength of these propagation effects is evident in the dynamic response functions of various economy wide aggregates to shocks in agents environments in the statistics that we construct to summarize the strength of the propagation mechanisms in the model and in the volatility of exogenous technology shocks needed to explain the observed variability in aggregate u s output other authors have argued that standard real business cycle rbc models fail to account for certain features of the data because they do not embody quantitatively important propagation mechanisms these features include the observed positive serial correlation in the growth rate of output the shape of the spectrum of the growth rate of real output and the correlation between the forecastable component of real output and various other economic aggregates allowing for variable capital utilization rates substantially improves the ability of the model to account for these features of the data

wages implicit contracts and the business cyle evidence from canadian micro data evidence of macroeconomic conditions impacting the earnings of men in canada in a manner consistent with an implicit contracting framework is found using data from eleven cross sectional surveys spanning the years 1981 1992 the estimates are similar to those found by beaudry and dinardo 1991 using u s data their analysis is extended to incestigate whether the effects of macroeconomic conditions differ by age evidence is found that the wages of young men and men near retirement are most sensitive to changes in the macroeconomic conditions over their job tenure this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

use renewables to be cleaner meta analysis of the renewable energy consumption economic growth nexus abstract the renewable energy consumption economic growth nexus is a growing area of research over the last few years emanating to mixed results the aim of the current study is to quantitatively synthesise the empirical literature on the subject using the meta analysis approach in particular a meta multinomial regression is employed to investigate the sources of variation in the direction of causality between renewable energy consumption and economic growth this causal relationship takes the form of four hypotheses namely the feedback conservation growth and neutrality hypotheses to the best of author s knowledge this study constitutes the first meta analysis undertaken on the renewable energy consumption economic growth nexus the empirical results reveal that the variation in the supported hypotheses is due to a number of characteristics including model specification data characteristics estimation techniques cointegration methods and causality tests and development level of the country on which a study was conducted

self selection and the earnings of immigrants comment in a recent article in this review borias 1987 george borjas uses a standard model of self selection to demonstrate that immigrants in the united states may not necessarily be positively selected as is commonly assumed borjas empirical results based on u s census micro data merged with country of origin characteristics for 41 sending countries however do not provide clear or consistent results with respect to the immigration selection issue although they do confirm earlier findings that the characteristics of the countries of origin of u s immigrants explain a substantial proportion of the differences in their economic status jasso and rosenzweig 1986b the purpose of this note is to show that borjas results are themselves subject to biases due to additional processes of self selection in particular his inconclusive findings with respect to immigration selectivity arise from the use of a choice based sample enlargement of his highly selective sample of countries based on the number of foreign born in the united states yields results that appear to conform much more closely and consistently to conventional wisdom namely that the united states appears to attract those persons with above average skills we also provide evidence that changes in the earnings of aggregate immigrant entry cohorts used by borjas to measure the assimilation of immigrants reflect another evidently important selection process namely selective emigration the effects of country characteristics on the wages of the foreign born at entry immigration selectivity are thus not comparable to the effects of such variables on the changes in the characteristics of an immigrant cohort over time emigration selectivity the effects via immigration self selection of country of origin characteristics on the quality q of immigrants who migrate to a destination country is neatly summarized by borjas in his equation 12 with unobservables determining earnings normally distributed the expected quality of immigrants in the united states is given by

climatic factors as determinants of international migration we examine environmental change as a potential determinant of international migration we distinguish between unexpected short run factors captured by natural disasters as well as long run climate change and climate variability captured by deviations and volatilities of temperatures and rainfall from and around their long run averages starting from a simple neo classical model we use a panel dataset of bilateral migration flows for the period 1960 2000 that allows us to control for numerous time varying and time invariant factors we find no direct impact of climatic change on international migration across our entire sample these results are robust when conditioning on characteristics of origin countries as well as when further considering migrants returning home and the potential endogeneity of our network variable in contrast there is evidence of indirect effects of environmental factors going through wages we further find strong evidence that natural disasters beget greater flows of migrants to urban environs

why have aggregate skilled hours become so cyclical since the mid 1980 s this paper documents and discusses a dramatic change in the cyclical behavior of aggregate hours worked by individuals with a college degree skilled workers since the mid 1980 s using the cps outgoing rotation data set for the period 1979 1 2003 4 we find that the volatility of aggregate skilled hours relative to the volatility of gdp has nearly tripled since 1984 in contrast the cyclical properties of unskilled hours have remained essentially unchanged we evaluate the extent to which a simple supply demand model for skilled and unskilled labor with capital skill complementarity in production can help explain this stylized fact within this framework we identify three effects which would lead to an increase in the relative volatility of skilled hours i a reduction in the degree of capital skill complementarity ii a reduction in the absolute volatility of gdp and unskilled hours and iii an increase in the level of capital equipment relative to skilled labor we provide empirical evidence in support of each of these effects our conclusion is that these three mechanisms can jointly explain about sixty percent of the observed increase in the relative volatility of skilled labor the reduction in the degree of capital skill complementarity contributes the most to this result

explaining spatial patterns of foreign employment in germany this paper investigates the main determinants of the representation of foreign employees across german regions since migration determinants are not necessarily the same for workers of different na

self selection and the earnings of immigrants this paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate the empirical study shows that differences in the u s earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills but from different home countries are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration excerpt

efficiency gains from liberalizing labor mobility in this paper we quantify the effect of a complete liberalization of cross border migration on the world gdp and its distribution across regions we build a general equilibrium model endogenizing bilateral migration and income disparities between and within countries our calibration strategy uses data on effective and potential migration to identify total migration costs and visa costs by education level data on potential migration reveal that the number of people in the world who have a desire to migrate is around 400 million this number is much smaller than that predicted in previous studies and reflects the existence of high incompressible migration costs in our benchmark framework liberalizing migration increases the world gdp by 11 5 12 5 percent in the medium term our robustness analysis reveals that the gains are always limited in the range of 7 0 percent with schooling externalities to 17 9 percent if network effects are accounted for

input output linkages and sectoral volatility why are some sectors more volatile than others this paper uncovers evidence of an empirical regularity in the us economy upstream sectors that are far removed from final consumers have higher levels of output volatility the relationship between volatility and upstreamness is not driven by sector size sector concentration trade openness or the level of aggregation at which sectors are defined rather the paper shows a stronger link between upstreamness and nominal output volatility than with indexes of real output volatility aggregate exports at the national level also reflect the empirical regularity of higher volatility with upstreamness export volatility is higher in economies with trade portfolios dominated by upstream sectors on average reducing the upstreamness of exports by 1 also reduces aggregate export volatility by about 10 the pattern of higher volatility for upstream sectors is explained with a model of demand shock transmission between sectors

x efficiency and technical efficiency efficiency measurement has become a very popular field in applied economics in recent years and with this interest there has been a large intellectual investment in refining the empirical methods available to researchers in the area in this paper we relate these developments to harvey leibenstein s original 1966 insight into the psychological ideas underlying the notion that economic agents may not achieve maximal efficiency in their productive decisions and behaviour of course it is always possible to argue that apparent inefficiency only arises from a failure of the observer to realise what it is that is being maximized however we evade this easy escape route into non falsifiable hypothesizing and instead take at face value the fact that too many empirical studies have come up with substantial measures of inefficiency for us to ignore its importance for normative economics

fiscal implications of immigration a net present value calculation focusing on the net fiscal effects the gain from admitting immigrants is computed for a welfare state with large expenditures and a large tax burden sweden prices and behavior are held constant which allows a detailed analysis of the effects of immigration the present value of future tax revenues minus outlays is potentially large usd 23 500 per young working age immigrant but an average new immigrant represents a net government loss of usd 20 500 the dominant factors are employment rates and age for young working age immigrants the break even participation rate for which the gain would be zero is 60 well below the empirical rate for this group

valuing environmental goods and services using benefit transfer the state of the art and science abstract the purpose of this special issue of ecological economics is to elucidate the state of the art and science of environmental benefit transfer and to assist in the design and reporting of future benefit estimation research compiling the insights of thirty two international experts from seven countries the special issue reviews the latest developments in transfer techniques as well as ongoing efforts to standardize and validate them taken together the papers in this special issue provide fresh answers to some long standing questions offer original research insights on state of the art issues and identify fruitful areas for future research this introductory paper provides background and context for the issues addressed by the contributing authors its purpose is to place the interdisciplinary thinking contained here in a comparative context highlighting the need for integration and collaboration to maintain the momentum that has propelled environmental benefit transfer into a widely used approach for estimating the economic value of environmental goods and services worldwide

the short and long run determinants of less educated immigrant flows into u s states we use a gravity model of migration and alternative estimation strategies to analyze how income differentials affect the flow of immigrants into u s states using annual data from the american community survey we add to existing literature by decomposing income differentials into short and long term components and by focusing on newly arrived less educated immigrants between 2000 and 2009 our sample is unique in that the vast majority of our observations take zero values models that include observations with zero flow values find that recent male immigrants respond to differences in short term gdp fluctuations between origin countries and u s states and perhaps to long term trend gdp differences as well more specifically gdp fluctuations pull less educated male immigrants into certain u s states whereas gdp trends push less educated male immigrants out of their countries of origin effects for less educated women are less robust as gdp coefficients tend to be much smaller than for men

life cycle economies and aggregate fluctuations do the implications for business cycle issues change when we switch from studying infinitely lived representative agent models to more sophisticated demographic structures with finitely lived agents this article addresses that question by using a large overlapping generations model that is calibrated to u s demographic properties microeconomic evidence and national income and product accounts the finding is that the answers obtained are basically the same for the two kinds of models the article also explores the relative volatility of hours across age groups an issue that cannot be addressed by using the infinitely lived representative agent abstraction

demographics and business cycle volatility a spurious relationship summary this paper replicates the estimation results of three studies on the impact of the age composition of the labor force on business cycle volatility and investigates whether they signal a meaningful long run relationship we show that both the volatile age labor force share variable and the business cycle volatility measure exhibit non stationary behavior but find no robust evidence of cointegration hence the estimation results reported in the literature may be spurious this conclusion is further supported by the finding that the strong relationship i disappears when cross sectional dependence is accounted for using the ccep estimator and ii is highly sensitive to small changes in the composition of the sample to data revisions and to the exact definition of the volatile age labor share copyright 2016 john wiley sons ltd

the effect of immigration on public finances the impact of immigration on the public finances is an important influence on public opinion this study aims to provide a thorough conceptual survey pointing out the complexities of a full understanding and the relevance of indirect effects and covering both static perspectives and longer run dynamic issues it considers simple accounting approaches which are relatively neglectful of behavioural responses but also tries to bring out the complexities in the nature of the relationship between immigration and the public exchequer that come with more sophisticated modelling of its economic effects

testing the internal consistency of contingent valuation surveys abstract for an internal consistency check one can examine wtp responses to different surveys holding an environmental problem constant concave preferences imply wtpconcavein the success of a remedy the same preferences imply wtpconvexin the magnitude of an environmental problem assuming a successful remedy having opposite signed curvature of these two wtp patterns is general not requiring concave preferences for an adding up test an environmental commodity can be divided then wtp for one part plus wtp for the second part conditional on already having the first part equals wtp for the whole adjusted by an income effect

networks in the modern economy mexican migrants in the u s labor market this paper attempts to identify job networks among mexican migrants in the u s labor market the empirical analysis uses data on migration patterns and labor market outcomes based on a sample of individuals belonging to multiple origin communities in mexico over a long period of time each community s network is measured by the proportion of the sampled individuals who are located at the destination the united states in any year we verify that the same individual is more likely to be employed and to hold a higher paying nonagricultural job when his network is exogenously larger by including individual fixed effects in the employment and occupation regressions and by using rainfall in the origin community as an instrument for the size of the network at the destination

hedonic models and air pollution twenty five years and counting this paper reports a meta analysis of how effectively hedonic property models have detected the influence of air pollution on housing prices probit estimates are reported describing how data model specification and local property market conditions in cities represented in thirty seven studies influence the ability of hedonic models to uncover negative statistically significant relationships between housing prices and air pollution measures

international migration with heterogeneous agents theory and evidence for germany 1967 2009 temporary migration though empirically relevant is often ignored in formal models this paper proposes a migration model with heterogeneous agents and persistent cross country income differentials that features temporary migration in equilibrium there exists a positive relation between the stock of migrants and the income differential while the net migration flow becomes zero consequently existing empirical migration models estimating net migration flows instead of stocks may be misspecified this suspicion appears to be confirmed by our investigation of the cointegration relationships of german migration stocks and flows since 1967 we find that i panel unit root tests reject the hypothesis that migration flows and the explanatory variables are integrated of the same order while migration stocks and the explanatory variables are all i 1 variables and ii the hypothesis of cointegration cannot be rejected for the stock model

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

on the sources of heterogeneity in banking efficiency literature one learns two main lessons from studying the great quantity of banking efficiency literature these lessons regard the heterogeneity in results and the absence of a comprehensive review aimed at understanding the reasons for this variability surprisingly although this issue is well known it has not been systematically analyzed before in order to fill this gap we perform a meta regression analysis mra by examining 1 661 efficiency scores retrieved from 120 papers published over the period 2000 2014 the meta regression is estimated by using the random effects multilevel model reml because it controls for within study and between study heterogeneity the analysis yields four main results firstly parametric methods yield lower levels of banking efficiency than nonparametric studies this holds true even after controlling for the approach used in selecting the inputs and outputs of the frontier secondly we show that banking efficiency is highest when using the value added approach followed by estimates from studies based on the intermediation method whereas those based on the hybrid approach are the lowest thirdly efficiency scores also depend on the quality of studies and on the number of observations and variables used in the primary papers as far as the effects of sample size dimension and quality of papers are concerned there are significant differences in sign and magnitude between parametric and nonparametric studies finally cost efficiency is found to be higher than profit and production efficiency interestingly mra results are robust to the potential outliers in efficiency and sample size distributions