the relative quality of foreign educated nurses in the united states we examine the relative quality of foreign educated nurses using wages as a measure of skill philippine educated nurses enjoy a wage premium that is not explained by observed differences in worker or job characteristics we reconcile the results with a roy model featuring endogenous skill acquisition and provide some empirical evidence of double selection into nursing and migration our results suggest that the wage premium is likely driven by strong positive selection into nursing among filipinos resulting from high and heterogeneous returns to the occupation due to active government support for nurse migration in the philippines

how important is selection experimental vs non experimental measures of the income gains from migration measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non random selection of migrants from the general population making it difficult to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non migrants this paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem providing an experimental measure of the income gains from migration new zealand allows a quota of tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery to choose among the excess number of applicants a unique survey conducted by the authors in these two countries allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate but whose names were not drawn in the lottery after allowing for the effect of non compliance among some of those whose names were drawn the authors also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the lottery comparing this non applicant group with the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration they find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills as a result non experimental methods are found to overstate the gains from migration by 9 to 82 percent a good instrumental variable works best while difference in differences and bias adjusted propensity score matching also perform comparatively well

property rights land liquidity and internal migration in the early twentieth century a large number of households resettled from the european to the asian part of the russian empire we propose that this dramatic migration was rooted in institutional changes initiated by the 1906 stolypin land titling reform one might expect better property rights to decrease the propensity to migrate by improving economic conditions in the reform area however this titling reform increased land liquidity and actually promoted migration by easing financial constraints and decreasing opportunity costs treating the reform as a quasi natural experiment we employ difference in differences analysis on a panel of province level data that describe migration and economic conditions we find that the reform had a sizeable effect on migration to verify the land liquidity effect we exploit variation in the number of households participating in the reform this direct measure of the reform mechanism estimates that land liquidity explains approximately 18 of migration during this period

job loss and regional mobility we study the migration behavior of displaced workers and find that job displacement increases regional mobility we find however that noneconomic factors such as family ties are very important

does increasing women s schooling raise the schooling of the next generation the positive cross sectional relationship between the schooling of mothers and their children is substantially biased upward due to correlations between schooling and heritable ability as well as assortative mating an increase in the schooling of women would not have beneficial effects in terms of the schooling of children increased maternal schooling leads to reduced home time for mothers anticipating the consequences of investing in women s schooling requires attention to the role that schooling plays in the marriage market as well as to opportunities in the labor market for women

europe s tired poor huddled masses self selection and economic outcomes in the age of mass migration during the age of mass migration 1850 1913 one of the largest migration episodes in history the united states maintained a nearly open border allowing the study of migrant decisions unhindered by entry restrictions we estimate the return to migration while accounting for migrant selection by comparing norway to us migrants with their brothers who stayed in norway in the late nineteenth century we also compare fathers of migrants and nonmigrants by wealth and occupation we find that the return to migration was relatively low 70 percent and that migrants from urban areas were negatively selected from the sending population keep ancient lands your storied pomp cries she with silent lips give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe free the wretched refuse of your teeming shore send these the homeless tempest tost to me i lift my lamp beside the golden door emma lazarus 1883

long run cultural divergence evidence from the neolithic revolution this paper investigates the long run influence of the neolithic revolution on contemporary cultural norms as reflected in the dimension of collectivism individualism we present a theory of agricultural origins of cultural divergence where we claim that the advent of farming in a core region was characterized by collectivist values and eventually triggered the out migration of individualistic farmers towards more and more peripheral areas this migration pattern caused the initial cultural divergence which remained persistent over generations using detailed data on the date of adoption of neolithic agriculture among western regions and countries the empirical findings show that the regions which adopted agriculture early also value obedience more and feel less in control of their lives the findings add to the literature by suggesting the possibility of extremely long lasting norms and beliefs influencing today s socioeconomic outcomes

the selection of high skilled emigrants we measure selection among high skilled emigrants from germany using predicted earnings migrants to less equal countries are positively selected relative to nonmigrants while migrants to more equal countries are negatively selected consistent with the prediction in borjas 1987 positive selection to less equal countries reflects university quality and grades and negative selection to more equal countries reflects university subject and gender migrants to the united states are highly positively selected and concentrated in stem fields our results highlight the relevance of the borjas model for high skilled individuals when credit constraints and other migration barriers are unlikely to be binding

income inequality in the united states 1913 1998 this paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the united states using individual tax returns data top income and wages shares display a u shaped pattern over the century our series suggest that the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the great depression and world war ii have had a permanent effect on top capital incomes we argue that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from fully recovering from these shocks top wage shares were flat before world war ii dropped precipitously during the war and did not start to recover before the late 1960s but are now higher than before world war ii as a result the working rich have replaced the rentiers at the top of the income distribution

intergenerational occupational mobility in great britain and the united states since 1850 abstract the us tolerates more inequality than europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than europe s though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century we extend this comparison into the nineteenth century using 10 000 nationally representative british and us fathers and sons the us was more mobile than britain through 1900 so in the experience of those who created the us welfare state in the 1930s the us had indeed been exceptional the us mobility lead over britain was erased by the 1950s as us mobility fell from its nineteenth century levels jel j62 n31 n32 n33 n34

immigrants and the making of america we study the effects of european immigration to the u s during the age of mass migration 1850 1920 on economic prosperity exploiting cross county variation in immigration that arises from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant flows and of the gradual expansion of the railway network we find that counties with more historical immigration have higher income less poverty less unemployment higher rates of urbanization and greater educational attainment today the long run effects seem to capture the persistence of short run benefits including greater industrialization increased agricultural productivity and more innovation

the effect of sibling sex composition on women s education and earnings this paper documents the impact of siblings on the education of men and women born in the united states between 1920 and 1965 we examine the effect of the number and sex composition of a boy or girl s siblings on that child s educational attainment we find that throughout the century women s educational choices have been systematically affected by the sex composition of her siblings and that men s choices have not women raised only with brothers have received on average significantly more education than women raised with any sisters controlling for household size since sibling sex composition affects women s educational attainment and plausibly may be unrelated to other determinants of earnings it may provide a useful instrument for education in earnings functions for women our results suggest that standard estimates significantly underestimate the return to schooling for women

international migration and the role of institutions we study the determinants of international migration with special attention to the role of institutional factors other than economic and demographic fundamentals we evaluate the impact of political institutions and of those institutions specifically targeted at attracting migrants for a dataset on 19th century migration we find that economic and demographic differentials play a major role but that the quality of institutions also matter we produce evidence that both political and migration institutions represent significant factors of attraction even after controlling for their potential endogeneity through a set of instruments exploiting colonial history and the institutions inherited from the past

earnings distribution of cuban immigrants in the usa evidence from quantile regression with sample selection abstractthis article analyses the conditional earnings distribution for cuban immigrants in the usa considering buchinsky sample selection in a quantile regression model the test proposed by huber and melly to test the independence between error terms and regressors conditional on the selection probability is also considered this is the first attempt in the migration literature to use quantile regression with sample selection the data used come from the us american community survey the results show that the hypothesis of conditional independence is not rejected and increments in earnings associated with the usual socioeconomic characteristics in labour studies vary between the cohorts considered the main conclusions are that a decline in returns from education may be a sign that a high level of education no longer provides a competitive advantage and that being a black person is associated with substantially lower earnings regardless of the individuals position in the earnings distribution this

in the name of the son and the daughter intergenerational mobility in the united states 1850 1940 this paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the united states using a novel empirical strategy the key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create pseudo links across generations we find that both father son and father daughter elasticities were flat during the nineteenth century increased sharply between 1900 and 1920 and declined slightly thereafter we discuss the role of regional disparities in economic development trends in inequality and returns to human capital and the marriage market in explaining these patterns jel d63 j12 j16 j24 j62 n31 n32 the degree to which economic status is passed along generations is key to under standing differences across societies and over time in the extent of inequality a low degree of intergenerational mobility can undermine the notion of equality of opportunity and may lead to persistent inequality recent research reveals that today intergenerational mobility in the united states is lower than in most other developed countries corak 2013 this finding stands in contrast with the national ethos of the united states as the land of unlimited opportunity was this view ever justified in this paper we provide a new perspective on the evolution of intergenerational mobility in the united states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we extend the existing literature by looking at the intergenerational elasticity in economic status between fathers and children of both sexes focusing only on father son cor relations may miss part of the picture daughters should be included if we want to know how the average well being of a generation correlates with that of their parents

estimates of the economic returns to schooling from a new sample of twins this paper uses a new survey to contrast the wages of genetically identical twins with different schooling levels multiple measurements of schooling levels were also collected to assess the effect of reporting error on the estimated economic returns to schooling the data indicate that omitted ability variables do not bias the estimated return to schooling upward but that measurement error does bias it downward adjustment for measurement error indicates that an additional year of schooling increases wages by 12 to 16 percent a higher estimate of the economic returns to schooling than has been previously found copyright 1994 by american economic association

how large are the effects from changes in family environment a study of korean american adoptees i analyze a new set of data on korean american adoptees who were quasi randomly assigned to adoptive families i find large effects on adoptees education income and health from assignment to parents with more education and from assignment to smaller families parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics outcomes such as drinking smoking and the selectivity of college attended are more determined by nurture than is educational attainment using the standard behavioral genetics variance decomposition i find that shared family environment explains 14 percent of the variation in educational attainment 35 percent ofthe variation in college selectivity and 33 percent of the variation in drinking behavior

revealing hidden co2 impacts from consequential consumption by matrix analysis application to japanese single households abstract the aim of this study was to develop a novel analytical framework using matrix based analysis to visualize the environmental impacts of consumption by considering the direct and indirect consumption of all the items induced by the initial consumption called consequential consumption in the context of consequential life cycle assessment lca the significance of this framework and the importance of considering consequential consumption have been demonstrated by analyzing the net co 2 emissions due to consumption through a case study of single households in japan the analytical framework includes the following four steps 1 categorization of consumers 2 calculation of a matrix of consequential consumption 3 impact assessment and 4 uncertainty analysis the normalization process plays an essential role in the calculation of a matrix of consequential consumption while meeting the constraint of fixed income the matrix of consequential consumption was obtained by analyzing the latest japanese household expenditure data for 2004 the net co 2 emission from consumption was estimated using the matrix of consequential consumption and the co 2 intensities of products services in japan as a result we found that the consumption of some products services have the potential to increase decrease co 2 emissions beyond their own co 2 intensities because of consequential consumption in spite of their relatively small co 2 intensities several products and services meat dairy products and eggs oils fats and condiments water and sewerage charges domestic nondurable goods have high net co 2 emissions per unit price japanese yen jpy this is because of high co 2 emissions from the consequential consumption of energy in contrast the net co 2 emission from charges for board are negative because of the substitution relationship between food and energy items compared with the results of other foregoing studies on food materials the net co 2 emission by our approach is much larger than that indicated by the conventional process specific approach

the causes and consequences of distinctively black names in the 1960s blacks and whites chose relatively similar first names for their children over a short period of time in the early 1970s that pattern changed dramatically with most blacks particularly those living in racially isolated neighborhoods adopting increasingly distinctive names but a subset of blacks actually moving toward more assimilating names the patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which the rise of the black power movement influenced how blacks perceived their identities among blacks born in the last two decades names provide a strong signal of socioeconomic status which was not previously the case we find however no negative relationship between having a distinctively black name and later life outcomes after controlling for a child s circumstances at birth

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

who leaves deciphering immigrant self selection from a developing country abstract using a novel data set from a developing country the federated states of micronesia fsm i analyze an emigration flow to the united states that has no legal barriers to entry and contains detailed information on the immigrant at home and in the united states i find that highly educated workers relative to the home country average have the highest likelihood of migrating from the fsm to the united states i also compare the premigration wages for the migrants and an observationally equivalent matched nonmigrant group and find that there is a positive and statistically significant difference between the two groups indicating that immigrants are also positively selected on unobserved characteristics the observed selection is consistent with the relatively large differences in home country and destination skill prices at the highest skill levels information on the immigrants characteristics before migration is central to my analysis of determining the nature of immigrant self selection on

are immigrants favorably self selected one of the standard propositions in the migration literature is that migrants tend to be favorably self selected for labor market success that is economic migrants are described as tending on average to be more able ambitious aggressive entrepreneurial or otherwise more favorably selected than similar individuals who choose to remain in their place of origin in recent years there have been challenges to the general proposition of the favorable selectivity of migrants in addressing this issue this paper considers alternative specifications of the migration model that are relevant for the issue of migrant selectivity excerpt

college choice and wages estimates using data on female twins the authors assess the impact of college quality on women s earnings and the influence of family and individual endowments on college choice using new data from a survey of identical and nonidentical twins born in minnesota the estimates reject models that ignore school choice the statistically preferred estimates suggest that ph d granting private universities with well paid senior faculty and smaller enrollments produce students who have significantly higher earnings later in life both the quantity of schooling and the quality of schooling resources are allocated to higher endowed individuals which exacerbates preexisting inequality in human capital and biases conventional estimates of school quality effects copyright 1996 by mit press

the effect of redistribution on migration evidence from the israeli kibbutz this paper tests a key theoretical prediction of public finance that local redistribution induces sorting of the population so that less productive individuals are located in communities with more redistribution specifically i use a longitudinal data set to test whether and to what extent the intensive redistribution practiced by israeli kibbutzim encourages exit of more productive individuals and entry of less productive ones the findings support the theoretical prediction kibbutz leavers are more skilled than both stayers and other rural migrants and they earn higher wages upon exit than observably similar city natives and other migrants in contrast individuals who earn lower wages in the city are more likely to enter a kibbutz but they are not more likely to move to other rural areas these findings also support borjas hypothesis that migrants self selection depends on the difference in returns to skills between the origin and the destination

from regulated cartel to regulated competition in the dutch health care system abstract health care reform is quite a hot issue in the netherlands today since the early seventies government has been trying to contain health care costs by direct control over prices and productive capacities as the results of this policy were disappointing several proposals were formulated for a structural reform based on a market oriented approach in 1988 the dutch government decided to radically reform the financial structure and organization of the health care system two major issues are the introduction of a national health insurance basic insurance and regulated competition among insurers and among providers compared with the last 15 years this can be considered a 180 degree change over of health care policy because of the revolutionary character of the proposals one can really speak of a perestrojka in the dutch health care system in this paper the recent developments in the dutch health care system will be reviewed first we will deal with the necessity of change in the dutch health care system then the main lines of the government proposals for a new structure of the health care system will be summarized finally the consequences of these proposals for the various parties involved will be discussed

the place premium bounding the price equivalent of migration barriers large international differences in the price of labor can be sustained by differences between workers or by natural and policy barriers to worker mobility we use migrant selection theory and evide

access to citizenship and the economic assimilation of immigrants immigrants often have lower employment rates and earnings than natives our empirical analysis relies on two reforms generating exogenous variation in the waiting time for citizenship we find that faster access to citizenship improves the economic situation of immigrant women especially their labour market attachment with higher employment rates longer working hours and more stable jobs immigrants also invest more in host country specific skills like language and vocational training faster access to citizenship seems a powerful policy instrument to boost economic integration in countries with traditionally restrictive citizenship policies

the more the merrier the effect of family size and birth order on children s education there is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family however there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory using a rich dataset on the entire population of norway over an extended period of time we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children while we find a negative correlation between family size and children s education when we include indicators for birth order and or use twin births as an instrument family size effects become negligible in addition birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children s education we also study adult earnings employment and teenage childbearing and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes particularly among women these findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child production focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well

international migration self selection and the distribution of wages evidence from mexico and the united states we use the 1990 and 2000 mexican and u s population censuses to test borjas s negative selection hypothesis that the less skilled are those most likely to migrate from countries with high skill premia earnings inequality to countries with low skill premia earnings inequality we find that mexican immigrants in the united states are more educated than nonmigrants in mexico and were mexican immigrants to be paid according to current skill prices in mexico they would be concentrated in the middle of mexico s wage distribution these results are inconsistent with the negative selection hypothesis and instead suggest that there is intermediate selection of immigrants from mexico