Download or read book Essays on Economic Migration and Public Economics written by Cynthia van der Werf Cuadros and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation adds to our understanding of how public policies support disadvantaged populations and how spillovers of those policies affect the population as a whole. It contributes to the literature by examining how language classes generate host-country specific skills, and promote the economic and cultural integration of refugees. It also adds to our understanding of the consequences of refugee reallocation on natives' outcomes by determining whether refugee' influx affects the academic achievement of native children. Finally, it studies how the Food Stamp program also benefits non-participants as it increases the availability of food and raises employment in the food retail industry. Chapter 1, studies how the largest inflow of refugees in U.S. history - the inflow of Indochinese refugees at the end of the Vietnam War - affected native children's academic achievement and post-secondary education. To identify the causal effect of refugees on native students' academic success, I use novel data from the U.S. National Archives that contain refugees' first county of destination. This was determined by resettlement agencies and, as I will show, was uncorrelated with previous schooling conditions. I find zero or small positive effects from the inflow of Indochinese refugees on native children's academic achievement. These estimates are small and precisely estimated. There is also evidence of an improvement in the quality of native students' post-secondary education as native students were more likely to complete bachelor and graduate degrees if they were living in counties where refugees were a higher share of the population. Chapter 2, joint work with Mette Foged, examines whether language classes for newly resettled refugees in Denmark promote their economic integration. We use travel time by public transport to language training centers as an instrument for host-country language acquisition by refugees to show that language instruction has a strong positive effect on proficiency in the host-country language and enrollment in formal education in the host country. As refugees are dispersed across municipalities and allocated to public housing in the municipalities based on availability at the date of arrival, travel time is uncorrelated with refugees' characteristics at arrival. Moreover, we also exploit variation in travel time that results from the opening and closure of language training centers. We find positive effects on employment and annual earnings but our IV results are not significant. The increase in earnings comes mainly from the extensive margin as we find no evidence of a positive effect on hours of work per week or hourly wage. The findings suggest that language instructions increase language proficiency and stimulate immigrants to invest in human capital which likely delays and increases any positive labor market return to early language learning investments. Interestingly, we find similar effects for men and women. Chapter 3, joint work with Timothy K.M. Beatty and Marianne P. Bitler, studies how food assistance programs shape the retail food environment. Food assistance is a large part of the food economy, with SNAP redemptions totaling $76 billion in 2013, or more than 10% of sales at supermarkets. Yet, we know next to nothing about how these programs affect food stores. We fill this gap, using a validated causal research strategy from the literature. Did the roll-out of Food Stamps during the 1960s and 1970s affect the retail environment at the time? We find that locations with earlier Food Stamp programs have more food stores, more workers in those stores, and higher real sales.

Download or read book Essays in Political Economy Migration and Public Economics written by Nikolaj Broberg and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis in four chapters focuses on political economy, migration, and public economics. The first chapter, joint with Vincent Pons and Clémence Tricaud, investigates the effects of campaign finance rules on electoral outcomes. In French departmental and municipal elections, candidates competing in districts above 9,000 inhabitants face spending limits and are eligible for public reimbursement. Using an RDD around the population threshold, we find that these rules increase competitiveness and benefit the runner-up of the previous race as well as new candidates, in departmental elections, while leaving the polarization and representativeness of the results unaffected. These results appear to be driven by the reimbursement of campaign expenditures, not spending limits. We do not find such effects in municipal elections, which we attribute to the use of a proportional list system instead of plurality voting. The second chapter, joint with Lars Ludolph, analyzes the effects of the migration wave from Central and Eastern European countries (AC-12) following their EU accession in 2004 on local level redistribution in England. We apply a difference-in-differences estimation strategy and find that greater migration flows led to spending on means-tested social care services to decrease in relative terms, while spending on education services increased. Our mechanisms suggest that, because of AC-12 migrants' young age at the time of arrival, the 2004 EU enlargement alleviated some of the pressure faced by social care spending in England. We find no evidence that spending shifts are driven by a change in the local willingness to redistribute income. The third chapter investigates the effect of ideological distance between EU Commissioners for Agriculture and Regional Policy and heads of governments on the allocation of agricultural and regional funds flowing to member states. Results show that ideological distance is a strong deterrent of funds being channeled. The effects are strongest in pre-election years, for countries providing the Commissioners in charge of the given portfolios, and for countries that are single-party-ruled as opposed to coalition-ruled. These results provide first hand evidence that the behavior of European Commissioners follows similar principles to national level elected politicians and can help the debate surrounding EU reforms and the political independence of its executive body. The fourth chapter, joint with Pietro Panizza, exploits a reform in Italy that granted mayors the right to run for a third consecutive term in towns below 3,000 inhabitants. We employ a difference-indiscontinuity design and find evidence of pandering effects by mayors in both their first and second term at the time of the reform. Results differ depending on the term of the mayor reflecting the importance of the horizon of when mayors' spending decisions pay off. We also find suggestive evidence of potential capture of first term mayors in the south of Italy.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Remittances and Migration written by Thomas Lebesmuehlbacher and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International migration is a growing phenomenon both in scope and complexity. Today, almost 3.5% of the world's population, or 250 million people, live outside their country of birth. Yet, the macroeconomic consequences of migration are not well understood. On the one hand, migration drains the home country of its human capital, thus reducing its productivity and tax base. In terms of host country effects, migration is often associated with negative labor market outcomes, including unfavorable effects on wages and employment. On the other hand, migrants tend to stay connected with their home country by sending back remittances, re-migrating after receiving an education abroad, or sharing information through networks. In host countries, migrants can both stimulate demand, and increase productivity. Abstract This dissertation contributes to the understanding of the macroeconomic consequences of migration for home and host economies. In particular, Chapter 2 establishes a link between migration and technology diffusion using a panel data set of 30 developed and 88 developing countries for the period 1980 - 2000. Then, Chapter 3 utilizes an open economy DSGE model with heterogeneous households to examine two important channels which influence the dynamic absorption of remittances: (i) the presence of borrowing constraints, and (ii) the distribution of remittances across recipient households. Finally, in Chapter 4, I study the design and impact of optimal government policies on growth and welfare when (i) refugees are sub-optimally distributed across countries and (ii) the presence of refugees causes congestion externalities for public services. The analysis contained in Chapters 2-4 gives new insights in several migration related spillovers, namely technology diffusion, remittances, and public goods congestion, yet emphasizes the complexity between migration and economic growth and development.

Download or read book Labor Markets Migration and Mobility written by William Cochrane and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is devoted to three key themes central to studies in regional science: the sub-national labor market, migration, and mobility, and their analysis. The book brings together essays that cover a wide range of topics including the development of uncertainty in national and subnational population projections; the impacts of widening and deepening human capital; the relationship between migration, neighborhood change, and area-based urban policy; the facilitating role played by outmigration and remittances in economic transition; and the contrasting importance of quality of life and quality of business for domestic and international migrants. All of the contributions here are by leading figures in their fields and employ state-of-the art methodologies. Given the variety of topics and themes covered this book, it will appeal to a broad range of readers interested in both regional science and related disciplines such as demography, population economics, and public policy.

Download or read book The Economic Sociology of Immigration written by Alejandro Portes and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1995-06-22 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Portes suggests that immigration constitutes an especially appropriate Mertonian 'strategic research site' for economic sociology in that it provides very good opportunities for investigating the embeddedness of economic relationships in social situations....the contributors expand the conventional domain of economic sociology quite literally in both time and space."—Contemporary Sociology "Alejandro Portes and his splendid band of collaborators make clear that the causes, processes, and consequences of migration vary dramatically from group to group, that a group's history makes a profound difference to its fate in the American economy. They have produced a sinewy book, a book worth arguing with."—Charles Tilly, Columbia University The Economic Sociology of Immigration forges a dynamic link between the theoretical innovations of economic sociology with the latest empirical findings from immigration research, an area of critical concern as the problems of ethnic poverty and inequality become increasingly profound. Alejandro Portes' lucid overview of sociological approaches to economic phenomena provides the framework for six thoughtful, wide-ranging investigations into ethnic and immigrant labor networks and social resources, entrepreneurship, and cultural assimilation. Mark Granovetter illustrates how small businesses built on the bonds of ethnicity and kinship can, under certain conditions, flourish remarkably well. Bryan R. Roberts demonstrates how immigrant groups' expectations of the duration of their stay influence their propensity toward entrepreneurship. Ivan Light and Carolyn Rosenstein chart how specific metropolitan environments have stimulated or impeded entrepreneurial ventures in five ethnic populations. Saskia Sassen provides a revealing analysis of the unexpectedly flexible and vital labor market networks maintained between immigrants and their native countries, while M. Patricia Fernandez Kelly looks specifically at the black inner city to examine how insular cultural values hinder the acquisition of skills and jobs outside the neighborhood. Alejandro Portes also depicts the difference between the attitudes of American-born youths and those of recent immigrants and its effect on the economic success of immigrant children.

Download or read book Essays on endogenous economic policy written by Isidoro Adolfo Mazza and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on High skilled Migration written by Shu-Ming Lin and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is comprised of three essays that focus on high-skilled migrations and how these are influenced by public policy and their economic impacts. The first essay links finance theory to labor economics and political economy in the context of migration and immigration policy. Using event study analysis, I measure the impact of immigration policy on the profit of employers and shareholders, in particular the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act (ACWIA) of 1998 nearly doubled the available number of H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers in FY 1999. The empirical results show that top H-1B visa user industries enjoyed significant and positive excess returns with the passage of the ACWIA of 1998, while industries with little need for H-1B visas experienced no significant changes. Robustness checks including international comparisons, nonparametric modeling and a sample-split Chow structural break test support the results. In the second essay, I investigate the findings of the first essay by employing two multi-factor models-Fama-French three-factor model and Fama-French-momentum four-factor model. Fama and French (1993) claim that the three-factor model does a better job isolating the firm-specific components of returns. In contrast, Campbell, Lo and Mackinlay (1997) argue that in practice the gains from employing multi-factor models for modeling the normal returns are limited. The results support the point of Campbell, Lo and Mackinlay (1997). In the third essay, I use microdata on immigrants from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. censuses to examine the growing earnings differentials between foreign-born Taiwanese and all other foreign-born immigrants. By decomposing the earnings gap, I show that over one-third of this gap (36% in 1990, 37% in 2000) can be attributed to the better endowment (higher education) of the Taiwanese. Among foreign-born Taiwanese from 1960 to 1999, 60% of the master degrees, 80% of the professional degrees and 92% of the doctorate degrees were earned in the United States. The growing numbers and rising percentage of U.S. earned degrees among the Taiwanese indicate their higher earnings relative to other immigrants in 1990 and 2000 can be attributed to their successful economic assimilation into the United States.

Download or read book Essays on the Economic and Political Effects of Immigration written by Marco E. Tabellini and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters on the economic and political effects of in-migration. In the first chapter, I show that political opposition to immigration can arise even when immigrants bring significant economic prosperity to receiving areas. I exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to US cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the Immigration Acts of the 1920s, and instrument immigrants' location decision relying on pre-existing settlement patterns. Immigration increased natives' employment and occupational standing, and fostered industrial production and capital utilization. However, despite these economic benefits, it triggered hostile political reactions, such as the election of more conservative legislators, higher support for anti-immigration legislation, and lower public goods provision. Stitching the economic and the political results together, I provide evidence that natives' backlash was, at least in part, due to cultural differences between immigrants and natives, suggesting that diversity might be economically beneficial but politically hard to manage. The second chapter asks the following question: is racial heterogeneity responsible for the distressed financial conditions of US central cities and for their limited ability to provide even basic public goods? If so, why? I study these questions exploiting the movement of more than 1.5 million African Americans from the South to the North of the United States during the first wave of the Great Migration (1915-1930). Black immigration and the induced white outmigration ("white flight") are both instrumented for using, respectively, pre-migration settlements and their interaction with MSA geographic characteristics that affect the cost of moving to the suburbs. The inflow of African Americans imposed a strong, negative fiscal externality on receiving places by lowering property values and, mechanically, reducing tax revenues. Unable or unwilling to raise tax rates, cities cut public spending, especially in education, to meet a tighter budget constraint. While the fall in tax revenues was partly offset by higher debt, this strategy may, in the long run, have proven unsustainable, contributing to the financially distressed conditions of several US central cities today. The third chapter, coauthored with Michela Carlana, studies the effects of immigration on natives' marriage, fertility, and family formation across US cities between 1910 and 1930. Instrumenting immigrants' location decision by interacting pre-existing ethnic settlements with aggregate migration flows, we find that immigration raised marriage rates, fertility, and the propensity to leave the parental house for young native men and women. We show that these effects were driven by the large and positive impact of immigration on native men's employment and occupational standing, which increased the supply of "marriageable men". We also explore alternative mechanisms - changes in sex ratios, natives' cultural responses, and displacement effects of immigrants on female employment - and provide evidence that none of them can account for a quantitatively relevant fraction of our results.

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economics of Migration written by Lucas Guichard and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Political Economy of Public Infrastructure and Economic Development in Regional Economies Internal Migration Political Cycles and Child Mortality written by José Carlos Rodríguez-Pueblita and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this dissertation is to study the role of local politics in the economic development of regional economies by analyzing the decision to spend on local public infrastructure, and its effect on population welfare. This thesis addresses two relevant phenomena and their effects on public infrastructure investment: internal migration and political cycles. About internal migration, this thesis provides a rationale for the role of population and labor force mobility in the decision to spend local public funds in public infrastructure in open metropolitan areas -with perfect population mobility- under different perception's approximations: voters either anticipate or not changes in wages and housing prices and the in- or out- migration generated in response to changes in local taxes and public spending composition. In addition, this dissertation investigates whether political cycles affect the development of local public infrastructure. The case study chosen is the progress of water systems in Mexican municipalities for the 1994-2001 period. A new model of political cycles is proposed to explain the existence of political cycles in water investment and explain cross-sample differences in growth of water networks. Finally, as a way to assess the impact on welfare of political and decentralizing reforms in Mexico, this thesis analyzes the effect of the evolution of water services and the decentralization of water companies on infant and child mortality at a municipal level for the same period as above.

Download or read book Economic Globalization and Governance written by Luís Brites Pereira and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-16 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting the diverse and profound changes triggered by the latest wave of economic globalization, this book highlights various governance responses at national, regional and global levels. The topics covered are wide-ranging and include economic history and development, European integration, exchange rate arrangements, industrial and labor economics, international cooperation and multilateralism, and public choice. The book is divided into three parts: The first part, which contains contributions by Barry Eichengreen and Marc Flandreau, is devoted to economic history. The second part examines open economy macroeconomics with a focus on Europe, including contributions by Jurgen von Hagen and Paul Krugman. The third part presents contributions to international political economy, and related interdisciplinary topics. This Festschrift is written in honor of Jorge Braga de Macedo, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Nova School of Business and Economics and a distinguished Portuguese academic whose work has an impressive global reach. The contributions, written by a selection of international authors, deal with his oeuvre covering the wide range of topics broached in this book, as his publication record amply attests.

Download or read book Essays on Ethnicity and Economic Choices written by Yi Crystal Zhan and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation addresses three broad economic choices within the field of labor economics and public economics: the choice of educational attainment, occupational choice, and household's residential location choice. The dissertation particularly focuses on the behaviors of immigrants and their decedents in the United States so as to understand the ethnic disparities in these economics outcomes as well as the policy implications. The first two chapters are both related to the cultural identity of immigrants. The first chapter, Scholarly Culture and Educational Attainment, examines second-generation immigrants in the United States who face the same market conditions and institutions but have inherited different cultural preferences for education. Using average educational attainment among the adult population in the second generation's country of origin as the cultural proxy, I find a significant positive association between scholarly culture and the second generation's educational attainment conditional on family resources. The second chapter, Money v.s. Prestige : Cultural Attitudes and Occupational Choices, studies the role that cultural norms play in occupational selection. I analyze the occupational choices of highly educated native-born American males and link their choices to relative preferences for pecuniary rewards vs. social prestige in their ancestral countries, as reported in the World Values Survey. These preferences help to explain the occupational choices of native-born Americans when their opportunities and advantages are taken into account. Moreover, a greater proportion of the population from the same ancestry in the residential area magnifies the effects of cultural attitudes, suggesting ethnic enclave is a mechanism for cultural transmission and reservation for migrants. The third chapter, Schools and Neighborhoods : Residential Location Choice of Immigrant Parents in Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, studies how immigrant parents value school quality for their offspring in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. The parental valuation of education is identified through the differential effects of school quality on the residential location choices of households with and without children. The results suggest that immigrant parents value school quality positively, and the weight assigned to school quality varies by income, education, and race/ethnicity. Low-income immigrants value school quality significantly more than low-income natives. Higher potential returns to education for their children and selective migration may explain why immigrant parents emphasize school quality in choosing where to live.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Migration and Cultural Identity written by Alexia Lochmann and published by . This book was released on 2020* with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Political Economy of Immigration written by Sumit S. Deole and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: migration economics, labor economics, integration of immigrants, voting, political economy, economic development

Download or read book Three Essays in the Economics of Migration and Education written by Pandeli Kazaqi and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present thesis is a study of the immigration phenomenon and its repercussions in both the economic wellbeing of individuals---who migrate (or not)---and the regions that receive or lose population. More specifically, the first chapter, using the SESTAT database analyzes the impact of interstate migration of U.S. citizens---from birth state to employment stat---on their career outcomes. This essay contributes to the economic literature by specifically studying the case of U.S.A and by empirically correcting possible selection bias that rises from the duality between migration propensity and human capital endowment. The results indicate that repeat migration is associated with higher average salaries, while late migration with salary penalty.

Download or read book Essays in Regional and Migration Economics written by Philipp Markus and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Public Economics written by Cauê De Castro Dobbin and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is a collection of three essays in Public Economics. The first chapter studies the optimal design of student loans as a lever to foster the inclusion of poor students in private colleges in Brazil. The second chapter delves into understanding the consequences of affirmative action as a tool to increase the participation of marginalized students in selective public colleges in Brazil. Finally, the third chapter investigates the effects of an expansion of the walls on the Mexico-U.S. border on unauthorized migration and economic outcomes. The first chapter is titled "The equilibrium effects of subsidized student loans" and is co-authored with Nano Barahona and Sebastian Otero. We investigate the equilibrium effects of subsidized student loans on tuition costs, enrollment, and student welfare. Two opposing forces make the impact on tuition theoretically ambiguous. First, students with loans become less price-sensitive because they do not bear the total tuition cost, causing tuition to rise (direct effect). Second, loan programs tend to increase the market share of more price-sensitive students, reducing tuition (composition effect). We develop a model of the supply and demand for higher education and estimate it leveraging a large change in the availability of student loans in Brazil. We find that Brazil's current loan program raises prices by 1.6% and enrollment by 11\% relative to a counterfactual without loans. We decompose the price effect into its direct (2.7% increase) and composition (1.1% decrease) components. Finally, we show that an alternative policy that gives loans only to low-income students raises enrollment by 16% relative to a counterfactual without loans. Most of the difference in enrollment between the two policies are due to price reductions coming from a stronger composition effect in the alternative policy. The second chapter is titled "Affirmative action in centralized admission systems" and is coauthored with Sebastian Otero and Nano Barahona. This chapter empirically studies the distributional consequences of affirmative action in the context of a centralized college admission system. We examine the effects of a large-scale program in Brazil that mandated all federal public institutions to reserve half their seats for public high school students, prioritizing those from socioeconomically and racially marginalized groups. After the policy was put in place, the representation of public high school students of color in the most selective federal degrees increased by 73%. We exploit degree admission cutoffs to estimate the effects of increasing affirmative action by one reserved seat on the quality of the degree attended four years later. Our estimates indicate that the gains for benefited students are 1.6 times the costs experienced by displaced students. To study the effects of larger changes in affirmative action, we estimate a joint model of school choice and potential outcomes. We identify the parameters of the model using exogenous variation in test scores-arising from random assignment to graders of varying strictness-that changes the availability of degrees for otherwise identical individuals. We find that the policy creates impacts on college attendance and persistence that imply overall income gains of 1.16% for the average targeted student, and losses of 0.93% for the average non-targeted student. Overall, the policy prompted a negligible increase in predicted income of 0.1% across all students in the population. Taken together, we find that the affirmative action policy had important distributional consequences, which resulted in almost one-to-one transfers from the non-targeted to the targeted group. These results indicate that introducing affirmative action can increase equity without affecting the overall efficiency of the education system. The third chapter is titled "Border Walls" and is coauthored with Treb Allen and Melanie Morten. Between 2007 and 2010 the U.S. government built 548 miles of border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Using administrative data on 5.7 million (primarily unauthorized) Mexican migrants, we study how the border wall expansion affected migration patterns between Mexican municipalities and U.S. counties. The wall changed migrants' choice of route and their choice of destination within the United States, but it did not have a large effect on the choice of whether or not to migrate. On net, we estimate the wall decreased annual migration flows by 46,000. Incorporating the decrease in migration into a spatial equilibrium model, we estimate that the wall increased (decreased) wages of low-skill (high-skill) U.S. workers by a modest $2.89 ($3.60) per year.