Local Labour Markets and the Interregional Mobility of Italian University Students

Abstract

This paper looks at a little-explored role that universities can play: that of representing a channel for brain gain, enabling regions to attract bright students who may decide to stay after they have graduated. In this way, universities can be a source of selective migration processes and possibly of diverging development paths, by augmenting the capability of economically dynamic regions to attract bright people from the lagging regions. In this paper, we argue that student mobility behaviour is a function not only of the quality of universities, but also of local labour market conditions in the destination locations. The paper relies on a gravity model, and shows that graduate migrations respond to several determinants, among which graduate job vacancies (that is, the dynamism of the local labour market) appear to be essential.     

Economic and spatial determinants of interregional migration in Kazakhstan

In this paper we analyze economic and spatial determinants of interregional migration in Kazakhstan using quarterly panel data on region to region migration in 2008–2010. The main contribution of the paper relates to the ethnic divide in Kazakhstan, which is the home of a big ethnic Russian community, adding to the scarce literature on ethnic differences in migration patterns. Against this background we investigate whether the determinants of interregional mobility depend on ethnicity. In line with traditional economic theory we find that migration is determined by economic factors, first of all wage. As predicted by gravity arguments, mobility is larger between more populated regions and distance has a strong negative impact on migration, indicating high migration-related costs. Most likely caused by stronger family ties and kinship bonds, the deterring effect of distance is higher for ethnic Kazakhs.     

The Role of Interregional Trade in Generating Change in the Regional Economies of Japan, 1980-1990

An earlier analysis (Hewings et al., 1998) revealed the 'hollowing-out' process, a decrease in the level of intraregional intermediation, in the Chicago economy during the period 1975-2011. The main force underlying this structural change has been the change in regional trade patterns in a way that interregional trades across economies has replaced the local purchases of intermediate inputs. The issue addressed in this paper focuses on the decomposition of structural change into changes in interregional trade and in technology, in order to investigate the nature of structural change over time and across sectors. The empirical realization is provided by reference to a series of regional input-output tables for a nine-region division of the Japanese economy (1980-1985-1990). The results revealed that interregional trade has played a key role in determining regional output level while technology itself had a tendency to decrease further.     

Environmental Management Evolution: Empirical Evidence from Spain and Italy

This research is focused on a survey conducted among Spanish and Italian companies in order to define the environmental management evolution within firms. Through this survey, a number of maturity stages were defined and validated, and the identification of the relevant factors for each of the maturity stages was made. Survey results show that companies start with environmental management issues due to legislation requirements. Afterwards, firms go through a training phase, continuing with the systematization stage, then look for economic benefits through ecological improvements (ECO² stage) and finish with the eco‐innovation and leading green company stages. The survey has shown that the maturity stages have application in all types of industrial sector. These are useful for those firms that want to make progress in environmental matters, as it helps them to identify at which maturity stage they are and what are the factors that they need to take into account to move forward. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Labor market rigidities and economic efficiency: Evidence from Spain

In the 1990s, Spain approved two labor reforms aimed at reducing the unemployment level and its volatility. Overall, these reforms involved two measures designed to induce firms to meet their labor needs via adjustment of permanent positions: restricting the use of temporary workers and reducing the amount of severance payments. This paper empirically assesses the impact of these reforms on the allocative efficiency of the labor input employing Petrin and Sivadasan's (2011) value of the marginal product-marginal cost gap methodology. We find a statistically significant increase in within-firm permanent labor gaps following the reforms. These results suggest that restrictions on the use of temporary workers (increasing the probability of hiring fragile workers for permanent positions), when coupled with uncertainty about enforcement of reduced severance payments, could more than offset the reduction in severance payments; hence, the net effect of the reforms could be to increase adjustment costs for permanent positions.     

Sharing Wealth: Evidence from Financial Ratios in Spain

Firms are managed on the basis of relationships between mutually involved groups, not only because of market forces, but also due to the influence that each group can exert over distribution decisions at a given moment in time. On the basis of a value added statement, it is possible to analyse the ability a firm has to reward all agents and to consider how the residual income is to be distributed. In this paper we set out to establish the tensions that arise between productive agents in the distribution of generated wealth. We carry out a time analysis of the movements between relationships that provide information on the distribution of that wealth, using data drawn from the Spanish Transport Equipment Manufacturing Industry. We propose a new multivariate dynamic linear model that is capable of analysing the joint evolution of the value added distribution ratios, with our particular objective being to throw light on the factors underlying this evolution. This analysis results in one single factor that explains 92.88 per cent of the total variation present in the residuals of the model.     

Tied Migration and Subsequent Employment: Evidence from Couples in Britain*

We use unique information on migration behaviour and reasons for migration to study the impact of tied migration on labour market outcomes among husbands and wives. Fewer than 2% of couples migrate for job‐related reasons and the majority of these move for reasons associated with the husband's job. Estimates from dynamic random‐effects models indicate that husbands and wives in couples that migrated for job‐related reasons suffer lower job retention rates than non‐migrants. Tied migration reduces the probability of subsequent employment for both husbands and wives and in particular has a large negative impact on job retention rates among wives.     

企业价值转移和资本结构:一项实证分析

本文选取2001年沪深A股677家上市公司的市场和财务数据,首先检验两个指标是否具有显著相关性:市值规模比和长期负债比率。并按价值转移理论,利用市值规模比把677家上市公司划分为三组:价值流入期、价值稳定期和价值流出期。实证研究处于不同价值转移阶段企业资本结构的特点。     

From Occupying Plazas to Recuperating Housing: Insurgent Practices in Spain

Urban insurgencies have spread across the globe like wildfire in recent years. The indignado plaza occupations in Spain are often cited as beacons of popular and widespread dissent. This article argues that urban insurgencies with the highest emancipatory potential in Spain today are found in the practices of the housing rights movement—the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, or Platform for Mortgage‐affected People)—that mainly entail blocking evictions and occupying empty bank‐owned housing. I elaborate on the notion of insurgent practice by examining how insurgency has been considered in relationship to citizenship, planning and public space. I propose insurgent practice as a way of articulating how people attempt to enact equality in everyday life and engage explicitly with socio‐spatial and political questions related to an emancipatory democratic politics. Based on a detailed analysis of two of the PAH's insurgent housing practices, I posit that recuperating empty bank‐owned housing with and for evicted families has the highest and most significant emancipatory potential, as it disrupts the core dynamics of urban capital accumulation and enacts equality for evicted households by directly contesting financial rent‐extraction mechanisms at multiple levels. In closing, I outline some conclusions that emerge from the Spanish housing case and from the concept of insurgent practice and urban politicizing practice in general.     

Voting on public pensions with hands and feet

Aging changes the political power in a democracy in favor of the older generations. With free labor mobility like that of the EU, the success of the gerontocracy is, nevertheless, limited by migration of the young generations. This connection between political voting and voting with the feet is analyzed in a two-country model with overlapping generations. The interregional competition on public pensions yields premium payments which are larger when the young generations' migration decisions take the impact on future pensions into account (strategic migration) than when these decisions are made myopically. The paper also pays attention to migration (in-)efficiency and to the implications of harmonization principles. Received: November 1999 / Accepted: July 2001 RID="*" ID="*" The paper benefited greatly from discussions at the EEA conference in Santiago de Compostela, the CESifo Workshop on Public Pensions in Munich and seminars in G?ttingen, Mainz, and Tellow. We are grateful to many seminar participants, two anonymous referees of Economics of Governance and, in particular, to Paolo Manasse for their valuable comments and creative hints. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Migration and gender differences in the home labour market: Evidence from Albania

This paper examines the role of migration in affecting the labour market opportunities of male and female household members left behind. We address this question by analyzing the impact of international migration flows from Albania, where migration is a massive and male-dominated phenomenon. We find that the labour supply of men and women responds differently to current and past migration. Controlling for the potential endogeneity of migration, estimates show that having a migrant abroad decreases female paid labour supply while increasing unpaid work. On the other hand, women with past family migration experience are significantly more likely to engage in self-employment and less likely to supply unpaid work. The same relationships do not hold for men. These results suggest that while left-behind women in Albania may take on the extra burden associated with the migration of male family members, they gain employment opportunities upon their return.     

The Structure of Payments in Technology Transfer Contracts: Evidence from Spain

This paper studies the impact of contract duration in determining scheduled payments in international transfers of technology. Analyzing a sample of contracts written by Spanish firms in 1991, the main empirical finding is a positive relationship between contract duration and the probability of the parties including variable payments in the first period of the agreement. This result suggests that the parties choose the type of payments to be made, whether fixed or variable, so as to avoid early termination of the relationship, even in the absence of opportunistic behavior or risk aversion.     

Industrial relations and the management of flexibility: factors shaping developments in Spain and the United Kingdom

Any analysis of workforce flexibility within particular countries needs to take account not only of the character of industrial relations and union organization at workplace and company levels, but also of how actions at those levels are influenced by broader regulatory arrangements covering employment and work practices. In other words, to avoid the over-simplifications and over-generalizations which much of the flexibility debate has in the past been (correctly) accused of and to expand the analysis offered by the relatively broad-brush, multi-country studies, it is necessary to locate issues of flexibility more securely within both existing national regulatory and institutional frameworks, and also to take account of patterns of union organization and job regulation at the local level, and the ways unions and workforces have responded to (and at times even shaped) different flexibility initiatives by employers. By analysing different types of enterprise in Spain and the United Kingdom, this article seeks to illustrate the role and significance of these factors for the particular development of workforce flexibility in the two countries.     

Separability and Aggregate Shocks in the Life-cycle Model of Consumption: Evidence from Spain

The purpose of this paper is to test the life-cycle permanent income hypothesis using an unbalanced panel from the Spanish family expenditure survey. Our model accounts for aggregate shocks and non-separability in the Euler equation among consumption goods, contrary to most of the literature in this area. Our results do not indicate excess sensitivity of consumption growth to income.     

The Pursuit of Opportunity: Explaining Selective Black Migration

This paper examines the destination choices of black migrants during the Great Migration. As previous research has shown, educated blacks were more likely to relocate to the North in the pre-World War II era. This analysis shows that this tendency can be attributed to the better educated migrants' ability to finance transportation costs, greater responsiveness to intercity wage differentials, and stronger distaste for Southern disamenities. After 1940, the destination choice gap closed, largely because migrant responses to wage differentials and valuation of Southern disamenities changed. These changes are observed both in the population at large and within birth-year cohorts.     

Regional variations in entrepreneurial cognitions: Start-up intentions of university students in Spain

Empirical research has recently paid considerable attention to the role of environmental factors in explaining regional variations in entrepreneurial activity. However, cognitive models have not usually included these factors in their analyses. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to identify some of the environmental cognitive elements that may explain regional differences in start-up intentions. Thus, an entrepreneurial intention model is developed, theoretically based on the planned behaviour approach, institutional economic theory and social capital theory. The empirical analysis is carried out using structural equation techniques over a sample of 549 final year university students from two Spanish regions (Catalonia and Andalusia). Results confirm that valuation of entrepreneurship in each region helps explain regional differences in entrepreneurial intentions. As expected, social valuation of the entrepreneur was higher in the more developed region (Catalonia), positively affecting perceived subjective norms and behavioural control. In Andalusia, the influence of perceived valuation of the entrepreneur in the closer environment was more important, affecting attitude towards the behaviour and subjective norms. These results explain some of the differences in the pool of potential entrepreneurs in each region. They also justify the need by public-policy decision-makers to promote more positive entrepreneurial values in relatively backward regions.     

Don't ask me where I'm from: thoughts of immigrants to Catalonia on social integration and cultural capital

Once you get here, you realize that thinking Foucault was writing for you was terribly na?ve, since in reality I did not exist as a subject for anyone like Foucault, or if I did it was only as an object of study’, recalls one of the protagonists in this essay, a collage of fragments of interviews with foreign immigrants from impoverished countries who have settled in Barcelona and other Catalan towns in recent years. Widespread prejudice in the host society dictates that these people are generalized as being on a lower cultural level, anonymous members of the growing mass of immigrants prepared to work at any price. The prejudice seems to be confirmed by the fact that the great majority of them do low-skilled or unskilled work in sectors such as the building trade, hotels and restaurants and domestic service. The reality, however, is very different. The average level of formal education of these immigrants is similar to that of the host population. It is the precariousness of their legal status or the often insurmountable barriers preventing recognition of their academic and/or professional qualifications, or simply cultural prejudice, that condemn them to accept jobs well below their personal potential. Thus, the host society wastes social and cultural capital of the first order, and lays foundations for a permanent division between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This essay offers a modest but revealing sample of the quality and diversity of the ideas and viewpoints of the immigrants themselves, an asset we continue to at best underestimate or more often ignore altogether.     

The Relationship between Unemployment Benefits and Re‐employment Probabilities: Evidence from Spain*

We provide the first Spanish evidence about the effects on re‐employment probabilities of variations in benefit levels and time‐to‐exhaustion. Increases in unemployment insurance (UI) benefit levels had a small disincentive effect on the re‐employment hazard on average. Around this average, there were larger disincentive effects for men with elapsed durations between 4 and 18 months, whereas for men unemployed longer than 18 months, or for men resident in the south, the effect was negligible. Re‐employment hazards increased when UI exhaustion was imminent, but the change was small. Extensions to unemployment assistance eligibility in 1989 for men aged 45+ years lowered re‐employment probabilities.     

Gentrification in Spain and Latin America — a Critical Dialogue

Major social and political transformations such as the shift towards neoliberal urban policies have widely altered the contemporary structuring of metropolitan areas in Spain and Latin America. One key consequence is the recapture of city centres by wealthy tenants and the eviction of poorer households, a phenomenon usually designated by the term gentrification. In comparison to the comprehensive documentation of gentrification in the Anglophone environment, few scholars have paid attention to this phenomenon in this area of the world so far. This article responds to this gap, providing an exhaustive revision of the debates about gentrification occurring in Spain and Latin America during the last decade and tracking two theoretical motivations. First, it stresses the necessity of characterizing gentrification discourses in Spain and Latin America, preparing a conceptual appropriation and contextualization of the term itself. Second, it confirms that gentrification in Spain and Latin America varies substantially from processes observed in the Anglophone world. As a result, the review develops insights into emancipating and challenging debates that remain useful for the mainstream gentrification discourse too. Addressing this, it proposes a reconsideration and repoliticization of gentrification through the territorial and linguistic lens of Spanish and Latin American researchers.     

Interregional Interdependence and Regional Economic Growth: An Interregional Input-Output Analysis of the Kyushu Region

The main objective of this paper is to examine the effects of the changes in economic conditions and government policies on the output growth of the Kyushu region between 1965 and 1990. This study uses the extended growth-factor decomposition method based on a three-region Japanese interregional input-output system consisting of Kyushu, Kanto, and the rest of Japan. The growth pattern of Kyushu changed noticeably over the period. The primary drivers of growth changed from the expansion of final demand within Kyushu to direct and indirect effects from outside Kyushu. This unambiguously indicates that Kyushu has facilitated interregional and international interdependence. The emergence of the processing and assembling sector, together with the construction of new networks of trunk railway lines, expressways, and communications, promoted closer interregional industrial linkages between Kyushu, Kanto, and the rest of Japan. In addition, the offshore transfer of production from Kyushu to Southeast Asia after the Plaza Accord Agreement strengthened Kyushu's international industrial linkages.