the housing market impacts of shale gas development using data from pennsylvania and an array of empirical techniques to control for confounding factors we recover hedonic estimates of property value impacts from nearby shale gas development that vary with water source well productivity and visibility results indicate large negative impacts on nearby groundwater dependent homes while piped water dependent homes exhibit smaller positive impacts suggesting benefits from lease payments results have implications for the debate over regulation of shale gas development jel l71 q35 q53 r31 technological improvements in the extraction of oil and natural gas from unconventional sources have transformed communities and landscapes and brought debate and controversy in the policy arena shale gas plays underlying the populated northeastern united states were thought to be uneconomical less than ten years ago but now contribute a major share of us gas supply 1 natural gas has been hailed as a bridge to energy independence and a clean future because of its domestic sourcing and compared with coal and petroleum derivatives its smaller carbon footprint and reduced emissions of other pollutants e g particulates sulfur dioxide car

valuing nuclear energy risk evidence from the impact of the fukushima crisis on u s house prices abstract behavioral economics suggests that individuals overweight recent unexpected and or rare events when updating beliefs this study investigates the effect of such an event the fukushima nuclear crisis in 2011 on the learning process of a local environmental risk by evaluating how perceptions of the risk of a nuclear accident are capitalized into house prices near nuclear power plants npps in the u s our results provide new evidence on the dynamics of the effect spatially the impact was concentrated in a 4 km radius around npps and temporally it peaked a half year later and dissipated one year after the crisis

private values of risk tradeoffs at superfund sites housing market evidence on learning about risk this paper incorporates a bayesian learning model into a hedonic framework to estimate the value that residents place on avoiding cancer risks from hazardous waste sites we show that residents are

a brain gain with a brain drain abstract we study human capital depletion and formation in an economy open to out migration as opposed to an economy which is closed under the assumption of asymmetric information the enlarged opportunities and the associated different structure of incentives can give rise to a brain gain in conjunction with a brain drain migration by high skill members of its workforce notwithstanding the home country can end up with a higher average level of human capital per worker

rent seeking activities and the brain gain effects of migration this paper studies migration and rent seeking activities in a framework of heterogeneous ability it is shown that despite the depletion of productive resources known as the brain drain the possibility of migration could sufficiently reduce participation in rent seeking activities and increase participation in productive activities such that the net effect of migration is a brain gain moreover the possibility of migration that sufficiently enlarges the relative reward to ability in the productive sector could result in qualitative improvements in the allocation of talent ce memoire etudie la migration et les activites de chasse aux rentes dans un monde ou les habiletes sont heterogenes on montre que malgre la perte de ressources productives que constitue la perte de cerveaux il se peut que la migration puisse suffisamment reduire la participation aux activites de chasse aux rentes et accroitre la participation aux activites productives pour que l effet net de la migration soit un gain de cerveaux de plus il se peut que la migration augmente suffisamment la recompense des habiletes dans le secteur productif qu il puisse en resulter des ameliorations qualitatives dans l allocation des talents

multivariate tests of the zero beta capm abstract a cross sectional regression test csrt of the capm is developed and its connection to the hotelling t2 test of multivariate statistical analysis is explored algebraic relations between the csrt the likehood ratio test and the langrange multiplier test are derived and a useful small sample bound on the distribution function of the csrt is obtained an application of the csrt suggests that the crsp equally weighted index is inefficient but that the inefficiency is not explained by a firm size effect from february to december

ethnic discrimination and the migration of skilled labor we develop a model of interdependency between emigration education investment and discrimination in the context of an ethnically divided developing economy assuming a rent extraction basis for discrimination we first endogenize ethnic discrimination in the benchmark case of an economy closed to migration and then explore how migration prospects affect ethnic inequality under the free migration assumption we find the intuitive result that migration prospects have a protective effect on the minority immigration restrictions set by receiving countries on the other hand have the paradoxical effect of creating migration flows that would otherwise have remained latent

human capital depletion human capital formation and migration a blessing or a curse abstract we specify conditions under which a strictly positive probability of employment in a foreign country raises the level of human capital formed by optimizing workers in the home country while some workers migrate taking along more human capital than if they had migrated without factoring in the possibility of migration a form of brain drain other workers stay at home with more human capital than they would have formed in the absence of the possibility of migration a form of brain gain

a forward looking ricardian approach do land markets capitalize climate change forecasts abstract the hedonic pricing method is one of the main approaches used to estimate the economic value of attributes that affect the market price of an asset this method is routinely used in environmental economics to derive the economic valuation of environmental attributes such as air pollution and water quality for example the ricardian approach is based on a hedonic regression of land values on historical climate variables forecasts of future climate can then be employed to estimate the future costs of climate change we show that this approach is only valid if current land markets ignore climate forecasts while this assumption was defensible decades ago when this literature first emerged it is reasonable to hypothesize that information on climate change is so pervasive today that markets may already price in expectations of future climate change indeed we show empirically that agricultural land markets in the united states now capitalize expectations about future climate change we derive a straightforward empirical correction to the standard ricardian approach called the forward looking ricardian approach that can be implemented with readily available data accounting for market beliefs decreases the estimated magnitude of climate change damages by 50 62

quasi experimental evidence on the effect of aircraft noise on apartment rents inferring the implicit price of an environmental good hinges on ceteris paribus conditions that are often hard to justify this paper uses an unexpected change in flight regulations as source of exogenous variation and identifies aircraft noise effects from price adjustments in the market for rental apartments controlling for spatial and apartment heterogeneity we find that aircraft noise reduces apartment rents by about 0 5 per decibel our results indicate i that noise discounts are overestimated in cross sectional studies because aircraft noise tends to be negatively correlated with omitted neighborhood and housing amenities and ii that noise effects are unlikely to be constant over the entire noise range

on multivariate tests of the capm abstract this paper evaluates the power of multivariate tests of the capital asset pricing model the results indicate that when employing an unspecified alternative hypothesis the ability of the tests to distinguish between the capm and other pricing models is poor an upper bound is derived for the distance the alternative distribution of the test statistic can be from the null distribution when the deviations from the capm are due to missing factors this upper bound explains the low power of the tests

brain drain and human capital formation in developing countries winners and losers using new data on emigration rates by education level we examine the impact of brain drain migration on human capital formation in developing countries we find evidence of a positive effect of skilled migration prospects on gross human capital formation in a cross section of 127 countries for each country of the sample we then estimate the net effect of the brain drain using counterfactual simulations countries combining relatively low levels of human capital and low emigration rates are shown to experience a beneficial brain drain and conversely there are more losers than winners and the former tend to lose relatively more than what the latter gain

does hazardous waste matter evidence from the housing market and the superfund program this paper uses the housing market to develop estimates of the local welfare impacts of superfund sponsored cleanups of hazardous waste sites we show that if consumers value the cleanups then the hedonic model predicts that they will lead to increases in local housing prices and new home construction as well as the migration of individuals that place a high value on environmental quality to the areas near the improved sites we compare housing market outcomes in the areas surrounding the first 400 hazardous waste sites chosen for superfund cleanups to the areas surrounding the 290 sites that narrowly missed qualifying for these cleanups we find that superfund cleanups are associated with economically small and statistically insignificant changes in residential property values property rental rates housing supply total population and types of individuals living near the sites these findings are robust to a series of specification checks including the application of a regression discontinuity design based on knowledge of the selection rule overall the preferred estimates suggest that the local benefits of superfund cleanups are small and appear to be substantially lower than the 43 million mean cost of superfund cleanups

do capitalization effects for public goods reveal the public s willingness to pay this article develops a welfare theoretic framework for interpreting evidence on the impacts of public programs on housing markets we extend rosen s hedonic model to explain how housing prices capitalize exogenous shocks to public goods and externalities the model predicts that trading between heterogeneous buyers and sellers will drive a wedge between these capitalization effects and welfare changes we test this hypothesis in the context of changes in measures of school quality in five metropolitan areas results from boundary discontinuity designs suggest that capitalization effects understate parents willingness to pay for public school improvements by as much as 75

nonnormalities and tests of asset pricing theories the robustness of the multivariate test of gibbons ross and shanken 1986 to nonnormalities in the residual covariance matrix is examined after considering the relative performance of various tests of normality simulation techniques are used to determine the effects of nonnormalities on the multivariate test it is found that where the sample nonnormalities are severe the size and or power of the test can be seriously misstated however it is also shown that these extreme sample values may overestimate the population parameters hence we conclude that the multivariate test is reasonably robust with respect to typical levels of nonnormality in traditional hypothesis testing a nonrandom test maps the values of a random variable into a sample space dichotomized into regions where a hypothesis is either accepted or rejected there are three possible outcomes from this process 1 a correct decision 2 a false rejection type i error or 3 failure to reject the hypothesis when it is false type ii error of the latter two types of error an error of the first kind is usually considered less desirable so typically a level of significance is selected with low probability of type i error e g 0 05 or 0 01 and a test is chosen so as to maximize power minimize probability of type ii error for the specified level of type i error knowledge of the relative level of these two errors is critical in assimilating the results of an experiment for example if the power of a test is equal to its significance level i e a weak test rejection of the null contains zero information 2 additionally in constructing parametric tests of hypotheses it is necessary to assume some distribution for the underlying data consequently when using parametric tests rejection of the null is only equivalent to rejection of at least one of the underlying hypotheses i e the null hypothesis or the distributional assumption interestingly the size significance level and power of procedures used to test

brain drain and economic growth theory and evidence we focus on the impact of migration prospects on human capital formation and growth in a small open developing economy we assume that agents are heterogeneous in skills and take their educational decisions in a context of uncertainty regarding future migrations we distinguish two growth effects an ex ante brain effect migration prospects foster investments in education because of higher returns abroad and an ex post drain effect because of actual migration flows the case for a beneficial brain drain bbd emerges when the first effect dominates i e when the average level of human capital is higher in the economy opened to migrations than in the closed economy we derive the theoretical conditions required for such a possibility to be observed using cross section data for 37 developing countries we find that the possibility of a bbd could be more than a theoretical curiosity

which hedonic models can we trust to recover the marginal willingness to pay for environmental amenities abstract the hedonic property value model is among our foremost tools for evaluating the economic consequences of policies that target the supply of local public goods environmental services and urban amenities we design a theoretically consistent and empirically realistic monte carlo study of whether omitted variables seriously undermine the method s ability to accurately identify economic values our results suggest that large gains in accuracy can be realized by moving from the standard linear specifications for the price function to a more flexible framework that uses a combination of spatial fixed effects quasi experimental identification and temporal controls for housing market adjustment

learning in a hedonic framework valuing brownfield remediation incomplete information in property value hedonic models can bias estimates of marginal willingness to pay mwtp using brownfield remediation as an application this article recovers hedonic values from a dynamic neighborhood choice framework that allows households to learn about brownfield contamination in a bayesian fashion before choosing where to live i find that ignoring learning yields nontrivial biases to the mwtp estimate this has important implications for hedonic valuation if agents are imperfectly informed estimates are used to calculate information s value had it been withheld from the public and to assess heterogeneity in information s value along site and homebuyer demographics

spring cleaning rural water impacts valuation and property rights institutions the brief summarizes the spring cleaning rural water impacts valuation and property rights institutions the first two rounds of spring protection occurred in january april 2005 and august november 2005 the author measure health impacts of spring protection an investment that improves source water quality the author also estimate households valuation of spring protection and simulate the welfare impacts of alternatives to the current system of common property rights in water which limits incentives for private investment spring infrastructure investments reduce fecal contamination by 66 percent but household water quality improves less due to recontamination child diarrhea falls by one quarter travel cost based revealed preference estimates of households valuations are much smaller than both stated preference valuations and health planners valuations and are consistent with models in which the demand for health is highly income elastic the author estimate that private property norms would generate little additional investment while imposing large static costs due to above marginal cost pricing private property will function better at higher income levels or underwater scarcity and alternative institutions could yield pareto improvements

directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities this paper propses directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities as a general concept that embraces a wide range of recently analyzed economic activities including the subset of rent seeking activities considered by krueger it then proceeds to provide a synthesis and generalization of the welfare theoretic analysis of such activities by developing a fourfold categorization of cases depending on the levels of distortions before and after the dup activity thus a unification and overview of the subject are achieved

subperiod aggregation and the power of multivariate tests of portfolio efficiency abstract when testing portfolio efficiency empiricists usually perform tests using subperiods and aggregate the results in some manner although the power of individual subperiod tests has been studied previously little is known about the power of the aggregate test power is evaluated here through simulations using two different aggregation techniques aggregate power is substantially higher than that for a single subperiod for example in one scenario the aggregate power is 0 77 over a sixty year period but only 0 17 for each five year subperiod in addition the level of power depends on the method of aggregation

linking the price of agricultural land to use values and amenities the recent appreciation in agricultural land values across the united states has raised a number of important questions for farmers farmland owners lenders and policy makers while traditional economic theory suggests that farmland values are determined by the discounted stream of expected returns previous research has shown that agricultural land values are actually driven by a complex set of factors this study leverages the unique characteristics of a national land based usda survey on farmland values and cash rents to estimate broad national level determinants of the market value of cropland and pastureland our results support past research findings that indicate farmland values are only partially explained by agricultural returns we find that multiple nonagricultural attributes of farmland also contribute to the market value

the voracity effect abstract we analyze an economy that lacks a strong legal political institutional infrastructure and is populated by multiple powerful groups powerful groups dynamically interact via a fiscal process that effectively allows open access to the aggregate capital stock in equilibrium this leads to slow economic growth and a voracity effect by which a shock such as a terms of trade windfall perversely generates a more than proportionate increase in fiscal redistribution and reduces growth we also show that a dilution in the concentration of power leads to faster growth and a less procyclical response to shocks jel f43 o10 o23 o40

do households prefer small school districts a natural experiment author affiliation h spencer banzhaf hsbanzhaf gsu edugarima bhalla gbhalla live unc edu acknowledgment we thank rajashri chakrabarti rob fleck jason fletcher john pepper jesse rothstein holger sieg david sjoquist todd sorensen christiana stoddard randall walsh anonymous referees and participants of a session at the 2006 southern economic association meetings and seminars at montana state university and the university of pittsburgh for valuable comments 1 introductionperennial discontent with the quality of public education in the united states is a constant motivation for new educational reforms one potential reform is to break up large urban school districts into smaller districts 1 this proposal emerges from two lines of logic first large districts may suffer from substantial diseconomies of scale a recent review of the evidence concludes that diseconomies may emerge in districts with as few as 15 000 students andrews duncombe and yinger 2002 see also barrow and rouse 2004 and duncombe miner and ruggiero 2005 by comparison the urban districts of new york city los angeles and chicago handle as many as 1 1 million 727 000 and 421 000 students respectively a second line of logic is that breaking up large school districts would provide more choice for households in particular the smaller districts may be differentiated horizontally with some emphasizing math others reading others specific extra curricular courses and so forth since smaller districts can respond better to parental input these differences can reflect local tastes additionally the new districts would have to compete with one another for students enhancing their incentive to improve their performance borland and howsen 1992 hoxby 2000 hanushek and rivkin 2003 sandstrom and bergstrom 2005 these reforms are subject to a market test following the logic of tiebout 1956 households should respond to exogenous changes in public goods by voting with their feet that is moving into improving communities and bidding up prices 2 consequently if households perceive that decentralizing large school districts is desirable for any of these reasons we would expect the ceteris paribus demand for housing to increase in school districts undergoing such reforms relative to nearby substitutes this article examines just such a market test studying the effect on local real estate markets surrounding the april 2000 breakup of the los angeles unified school district lausd into 11 subdistricts this breakup was only partial insofar as official authority remained vested in a single school board nevertheless the breakup delegated substantial power to a more local level creating 11 new superintendents and devolving authority over educational policy and curricula to the new subdistricts we employ a difference in differences hedonic methodology comparing changes in real estate prices before and after the breakup announcement within the lausd area to price changes in nearby districts our approach has three distinct advantages first the october 1999 announcement of the breakup plan was abrupt and surprising and was swiftly followed by official passage in april 2000 because the announcement was so abrupt and so well covered by the media we have an excellent proxy for households expectations and it is expectations after all that govern market behavior our proxies for expectations are based on the announcement date the implementation date and in some models an index of newspaper coverage second few of the benefits of the reform would be likely to spill over into other school districts making the lausd border a sharp boundary defining relevant control groups third the lausd area is not coextensive with the city of los angeles but rather includes some 24 cities this implies that any other potentially confounding political events over the period would affect real estate markets in only a portion of the lausd rather than the whole area a possibility that we can test

can a brain drain be good for growth in the source economy this paper analyzes the interaction between income distribution human capital accumulation and migration it shows that when migration is not a certainty a brain drain may increase average productivity and equality in the source economy even though average productivity is a positive function of past average levels of human capital in an economy it is also shown how the temporary possibility of emigration may permanently increase the average level of productivity of an economy

spatial hedonic models for environmental hazards and health outcomes this article examines the relationship between the total cost of services for radioprotection and the health outcomes in greece with a spatial hedonic model using data from the period 2010 to 2016

an embarrassment of riches confronting omitted variable bias and multiscale capitalization in hedonic price models abstract many researchers have addressed concerns of omitted variable bias in hedonic price models through the use of spatial fixed effects we argue that this approach does not consider the biases introduced by effects that overlap the zone of capitalization for nonmarket goods we show this bias can dominate the usual omitted variable bias using data on developer provided open space we control for multiscale capitalization and omitted variables simultaneously by extending the hausman taylor estimator where the panel component of the estimator is defined over repeated transactions within neighborhoods rather than the traditional definition following a unique cross sectional unit through time

democracy and environmental quality we develop and estimate an econometric model of the relationship between several local and global air pollutants and economic development while allowing for critical aspects of the socio political economic regime of a state we obtain empirical support for our hypothesis that democracy and its associated freedoms provide the conduit through which agents can exercise their preferences for environmental quality more effectively than under an autocratic regime thus leading to decreased concentrations or emissions of pollution however additional factors such as income inequality age distribution education and urbanization may mitigate or exacerbate the net effect of the type of political regime on pollution depending on the underlying societal preferences and the weights assigned to those preferences by the state

social stigma and asset value recent attempts by economists to identify and quantify the effect of social stigma on asset value have often been stymied by confounding mechanisms i use the unique circumstances surrounding the 1999 columbine shooting to estimate the effect of social stigma on asset value using a difference in differences model with property fixed effects i find the immediate effect of stigma from the columbine shooting is 5 7 of a property s value after one year this implies a 13 million loss from property sales in the year 2000 alone the results are robust to numerous specifications and synthetic control placebo tests this suggests that social stigma plays a role in consumer preferences

estimates of the impact of crime risk on property values from megan s laws abstract we estimate the willingness to pay for reductions in crime risk using the location and move in dates of sex offenders we find significant effects of sex offenders locations that are geographically localized house prices within 0 1 miles of a sex offender fall by 4 percent on average we then use this finding to estimate the costs to victims of sexual offenses and find costs of over 1 million per victim far greater than previous estimates however we cannot reject the alternative hypotheses that individuals overestimate risks posed by offenders or that living near an offender poses significant costs exclusive of crime risk jel k42 r23 r31

the benefits of avoiding cancer or dying from cancer evidence from a four country study abstract we use stated preference methods to estimate the cancer value per statistical life vsl and value per statistical case vscc from a representative sample of 45 60 year olds in four countries in europe we ask respondents to report information about their willingness to pay for health risk reductions that are different from those used in earlier valuation work because they are comprised of two probabilities that of getting cancer and that of dying from it conditional on getting it in the first place the product of these two probabilities is the unconditional cancer mortality risk our hypothetical risk reductions also include two severity related attributes quality of life impacts and pain the results show that respondents did appear to have an intuitive grasp of compound probabilities and took into account each component of the unconditional cancer mortality risk when answering the valuation questions we estimate the cancer vsl to be between approximately 2 and 5 950 million depending on whether the unconditional mortality risk was reduced by lowering the chance of getting cancer increasing the chance of surviving cancer or both the vscc is estimated to be up to 0 578 million euro and its magnitude depends on the initial conditional cancer mortality and on the improvement in survival the survey responses show that our measures of cancer severity impacts on daily activities and pain have little or no effect on the wtp to reduce the adverse health risks

on correlations and inferences about mean variance efficiency a framework is presented for investigating the mean variance efficiency of an unobservable portfolio based on its correlation with a proxy portfolio a sensitivity analysis derives the highest correlation between the proxy and a portfolio that reverses the inference of a test of sharpe lintner tangency for example the maximum correlation between the value weighted nyse amex portfolio and a portfolio inferred tangent ranges from 0 76 to 0 48 we also test whether the correlation between the proxy and the tangent portfolio exceeds a given level this hypothesis is often rejected for the nyse amex proxy at a correlation of 0 7

measuring the property value effects of local land use and preservation referenda this paper examines a massachusetts policy that encourages communities to raise money through referenda for preservation and affordable housing i use difference indifferences fixed effects and quantile regression to compare home prices before and after such referenda in two towns i include covariates representing existing land uses zoning and historic resources to estimate the value of these amenities standard regression techniques indicate weak effects of the referenda while the estimated coefficients on land use and historic preservation confirm that preservation has a positive effect on property values the quantile regression sheds light on some heterogeneity that goes unnoticed in standard regression results

unlocking amenities estimating public good complementarity abstract public goods may exhibit complementarities that are essential for determining their individual value our results indicate that improving safety near parks can turn them from public bads to goods ignoring complementarities may lead to i undervaluing the potential value of public goods ii overestimating heterogeneity in preferences and iii understating the value of public goods to minority households recent reductions in crime have unlocked almost 7 billion in property value in chicago new york and philadelphia still two fifths of the potential value of park proximity 10 billion remains locked in

evidence of the effects of water quality on residential land prices we use hedonic techniques to show that water quality has a significant effect on property values along the chesapeake bay we calculate the potential benefits from an illustrative but limited water quality improvement and we calculate an upper bound to the benefits from a more widespread improvement many environmental hedonic studies have almost entirely ignored the potential for omitted variables bias the possibility that pollution sources in addition to emitting undesirable substances are likely to be unpleasant neighbors we discuss the implications of this oversight and we provide an application that addresses this potential problem o 2000 acadcmic prcss

the bootstrap approach for testing skewness persistence this study presents a new methodology for testing changes in skewness between time periods or samples using the bootstrap method a monte carlo simulation experiment was conducted to compare the effectiveness of the bootstrap method with the method suggested by lau wingender and lau 1989 to test skewness persistence the results show the bootstrap method to be more powerful than the other method the bootstrap method was also used to determine the persistence of skewness in stock returns the results show that in a large percentage of stocks skewness persists over time

multivariate tests of asset pricing the comparative power of alternative statistics this paper examines estimation issues associated with multivariate tests of asset pricing two issues are considered 1 the constraint that the sample size n must be less than the time series t and 2 the relative effect on power of using the multivariate statistic versus a univariate counterpart we find that an alternative statistic that allows for large n does not dominate the usual portfolio tests more notably we find that the power of a simple diagonal statistic usually dominates the multivariate statistic for cases considered inthis study

residential property price differentials of waste plants evidence from beijing china as a primary source of urban pollution waste plants release toxic gases and polluted waste water that can cause great harm to human health and contaminate water resources the adverse impact of wa

the effect of legalizing retail marijuana on housing values evidence from colorado does legalizing retail marijuana generate more benefits than costs this paper provides a first step toward addressing that question by measuring the benefits and costs that are capitalized into housing values we exploit the time series and cross sectional variations in the adoption of colorado s municipality retail marijuana laws rmls and examine the effect on housing values with a difference in differences strategy our estimates show that the legalization leads to an average 6 increase in housing values indicating that the capitalized benefits outweigh the costs in addition we find suggestive evidence that this relatively large housing value appreciation is likely due to rmls inducing strong housing demand while having no discernible effect on housing supply finally we show that the effect of rmls is heterogeneous across locations and property types jel k20 r28

inducing human capital formation migration as a substitute for subsidies abstract when productivity is fostered by an individual s own human capital as well as by the economy wide average level of human capital individuals under invest in human capital the provision of subsidies for the formation of human capital conditional on the subsidy being self financed by tax revenues can bring the economy to its socially optimal level of human capital yet a strictly positive probability of migration to a richer country by raising both the level of human capital formed by optimizing individuals in the home country and the average level of human capital of non migrants in the country can enhance welfare and nudge the economy toward the social optimum indeed under a well controlled restrictive migration policy the welfare of all workers is higher than in the absence of this policy

what do property values really tell us a hedonic study of underground storage tanks hedonic property value models are widely used but are susceptible to potentially invalid conjectures based on the assumed measure of environmental quality this paper focuses on an application where this is of particular concern leaking underground storage tanks i estimate a hedonic model using quasi experimental and spatial econometric techniques similar to previous studies i examine how house prices vary with distance to the disamenity this approach yields little evidence that prices are adversely impacted however to better measure risks i utilize home specific data on groundwater well tests and correspondence from regulators and find an 11 depreciation when households are well informed

migration as an antidote to rent seeking abstract we develop a new mechanism through which skilled migration may influence economic performance in the sending country if agents can choose between acting as rent seekers and engaging in productive activities and only productive skills are exportable a positive probability of migration to a more secure economy reduces the relative expected returns from rent seeking thus decreasing the proportion of skilled workers who opt for parasitic activities such an improvement in the allocation of talent may prevail over the loss of skilled workers due to outmigration however we show that this result is not robust to the introduction of endogenous protection if productive workers share their resources between accumulation of productive capital and investment in security prospective migration may induce a weaker protection against rent seeking which in turn might depress average income in the source economy