Heaven's Swing Door: Endogenous Skills,Migration Networks,and the Effectiveness of Quality‐Selective Immigration Policies

A growing number of OECD countries are leaning toward the adoption of selective immigration policies, which are expected to raise the quality (or education level) of migrants. This view neglects two important dynamic effects: the role of migration networks, which could reduce the quality of migrants, and the responsiveness of education decisions to the prospect of migration. We propose a model of self‐selection into migration with endogenous education choices, which predicts that migration networks and the quality of migrants can be positively associated when destination countries adopt sufficiently selective immigration policies. Empirical evidence, presented as background motivation, suggests that this is indeed the case.     

International immigration and economic welfare in an efficiency wage model: The co-existence case of both legal and illegal foreign workers

Abstract. In the developed countries some native workers are unemployed while there exist illegal unskilled (legal skilled) foreign workers who are complementary to (substitutable for) natives and their wages are usually lower than (equal to) that of natives. Reflecting this situation, we introduce two types of immigrant in an efficiency wage model. It is shown that domestic government should exclude illegal foreign workers but welcome legal ones if the total number of illegal immigrants is small enough and well controlled. On the other hand, legal immigration should be restricted if the flood of illegal immigration is out of control.     

Immigration and health care reform: shared struggles

The connection between health care and immigration share overlaping key areas in policy reform. General concern, anger, and fear about immigration has been spreading nationwide. While illegal immigrants' use of expensive emergency department services does add to the cost for uncompensated care, this expenditure is not a primary cost driver but more a symptom of little or no access to preventative or primary health care. As a result of federal inaction, more state politicians are redefining how America copes with illegal residents including how or whether they have access to health care. The overlap of immigration and health care reform offers an opportunity for us to enter the next round of debate from a more informed vantage point.     

居民视野中的服务型政府建设

居民是公共服务的主要接受者。本文以天津市H区为个案,对辖区6个街道32万居民采用分层抽样结合配额抽样的方法,分析居民对政府提供公共服务的主观评价,对城市政府完善公共服务体系建设提出政策建议。     

Migration and urban poverty and inequality in China

Using data from recent surveys of migrants and local residents in ten cities in 2005, this paper examines how migration influences measurements of urban poverty and inequality in China, and also compares how other indicators of well-being differ for migrants and local residents. Contrary to previous studies that report that the income poverty rate of migrant households is 1.5 times that of local resident households, we find relatively small differences in the poverty rates of migrants and local residents. Although the hourly wages of migrants are much lower than those of local residents, migrant workers work longer hours and have lower dependency ratios and higher labor force participation rates. Including migrants increases somewhat measures of urban income inequality. Significant differences between migrants and local residents are found for non-income welfare indicators such as housing conditions and access to social insurance programs.     

Remittances to Latin America from migrants in the United States: Assessing the impact of amnesty programs

The magnitude of remittance flows to Latin America exceeds the combined inflows of foreign direct investment and official development assistance to the region. Since the United States is the destination country of the vast majority of migrants from Mexico, as well as from other Latin American countries, U.S. immigration policy can have a significant impact on the volume of remittances to the Latin American region. This paper studies how a generalized amnesty — a provision in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) — affected immigrants' remitting patterns. In models that control for immigrants' length of residence in the United States and for economic conditions in both the U.S. state of residence and the country of origin, we estimate substantial post-legalization drops in remittances sent home by Mexican-born migrants who legalized through IRCA. Given the potential positive impact of remittances on investment levels, entrepreneurship rates and the development of the financial sector, this finding underscores the importance of gaining a better understanding of the impact that immigration policies in immigrant-receiving countries may have on the stream of remittance flows to immigrant-sending communities in developing regions.     

An introduction to the economics of immigration in OECD countries

The share of the foreign-born population in member countries of the OECD is increasing, and this article summarizes economics research on the effects of immigration in those nations. Four broad topics are addressed: labour market issues, fiscal questions, the political economy of immigration, and productivity and international trade. Extreme concerns about deleterious labour market and fiscal impacts following from new immigrants are not found to be warranted. However, it is also clear that government policies and practices regarding the selection and integration of new migrants affect labour market, fiscal, social and cultural outcomes. Policies that are well informed, well crafted and well executed beneficially improve population welfare.     

Transfers and Bailouts: Institutions for Enforcing Local Fiscal Discipline

The growing importance of local and provincial governments as providers of public services and the importance of those services for the overall performance of the national economy has led to a careful re-examination of how public resources are allocated by decentralized governments. While the Tiebout model promises efficient local resource allocations, the conditions necessary for such outcomes—many local governments, fully informed and costlessly mobile households, no spillovers, residential head taxes—are rarely met in practice. Lacking a sufficient number of competitive local governments, however, other institutional safeguards must be found. Four such institutions are identified here. First, a stable central government managed by nationally elected political parties or presidents capable of making (second-best) efficient interpersonal redistributions of income while at the same time denying inefficient intergovernmental transfers and /or access to non-resident taxation. Second, a mature banking system and fully integrated national capital markets to minimize the economic consequences of a single government's failure to repay its local debts. Third, informed and sophisticated municipal bond and local land markets capable of evaluating local services and finances so as to shift back onto local residents the full economic consequences of inefficient local government fiscal choices. Fourth, a politically independent judiciary capable of enforcing constitutional rules for spending and tax assignment, local debt repayment, and balanced local budgets. Efficient central governments and efficient land and capital markets are seen here as necessary institutional pre-conditions for an efficient local public sector.     

Brain waste? Educated immigrants in the US labor market

This paper investigates the occupational placement of immigrants in the US labor market using census data. We find striking differences among highly educated immigrants from different countries, even after we control for individuals' age, experience and level of education. With some exceptions, educated immigrants from Latin American and Eastern European countries are more likely to end up in unskilled jobs than immigrants from Asia and industrial countries. A large part of the variation can be explained by attributes of the country of origin that influence the quality of human capital, such as expenditure on tertiary education and the use of English as a medium of instruction. These findings suggest that “underplaced” migrants suffer primarily from low (or poorly transferable) skills rather than skill underutilization. The selection effects of US immigration policy also play an important role in explaining cross-country variation. The observed under-placement of educated migrants might be alleviated if home and host countries cooperate by sharing information on labor market conditions and work toward the recognition of qualifications.     

Brain waste? Educated immigrants in the US labor market

This paper investigates the occupational placement of immigrants in the US labor market using census data. We find striking differences among highly educated immigrants from different countries, even after we control for individuals' age, experience and level of education. With some exceptions, educated immigrants from Latin American and Eastern European countries are more likely to end up in unskilled jobs than immigrants from Asia and industrial countries. A large part of the variation can be explained by attributes of the country of origin that influence the quality of human capital, such as expenditure on tertiary education and the use of English as a medium of instruction. These findings suggest that “underplaced” migrants suffer primarily from low (or poorly transferable) skills rather than skill underutilization. The selection effects of US immigration policy also play an important role in explaining cross-country variation. The observed under-placement of educated migrants might be alleviated if home and host countries cooperate by sharing information on labor market conditions and work toward the recognition of qualifications.     

Market competition and the distributional consequences of mobile phones in Canada

The aim of this paper is to better understand how competition based telecommunication policies function as a mediating variable in the distribution of socio-economic consequences of mobile phones using the case of Canada. Many observers characterize the Canadian market as being uncompetitive, and argue that this lack of competition has affected Canadians in terms of access. Thus, even though almost all Canadians have access to land-line services, mobile phone penetration is still relatively low. This could be relevant as mobile services are more likely to include data and other advanced applications. As it is, access is influenced by age, income, and education. Gender is also relevant particularly with the use of more advanced devices and services. The urban and rural divide is of concern particularly where remote communities can benefit from having mobile phones. In addition, the lack of effective competition can negatively affect the competitiveness of domestic businesses relative to foreign competitors. One of the implications of the Canadian policy towards mobile phones is that while its approach was to limit regulation (regulatory forbearance) in order to develop competitive markets, those markets did not necessarily emerge. Regulatory forbearance thus contributed to a particular pattern of distributional consequences. This article argues that competition needs to be aligned with the overall goals of telecommunications policy. To do this, a country needs to define not what degree of competition is required but rather under what circumstances government intervention is needed. It might be satisfactory to have only few players in one national context but not in another. Defining the scope of intervention is perhaps most related to the tasks of identifying benefits and costs of access and how these are distributed.     

Changes in income distribution and welfare from greater immigration of unskilled workers

This paper considers the consequences of greater immigration of unskilled labor on income distribution and welfare in the receiving country. To address these issues, both the sending and receiving countries are represented in a static general equilibrium model which distinguishes between skilled and unskilled labor and which allows prices to be determined endogenously. In this framework an inflow of unskilled labor is likely to reduce wages of unskilled labor, but whether capital or skilled labor benefits depends upon demand elasticities, elasticities of substitution in production, and differences across countries in the productivity of unskilled labor. National welfare in the receiving country is likely to rise, to the extent that the relative price of importable goods falls, non-residents already in the country receive lower wages, immigrants receive lower wages than those paid to domestic workers, and immigrants cause little increased demand for public services and transfer programs.     

Kaldorian Disaggregation,Temporary Migration and Domestic Welfare

We build a model with two agents: domestic residents and temporary immigrants. The model incorporates Kaldorian disaggregation, with the two groups consuming different goods produced in the economy. It is established that, under certain conditions, an increase in immigrant labor lowers the welfare of the domestic residents. This runs against conventional wisdom that temporary immigration enhances the welfare of domestic residents.     

The effect of migration on terror: Made at home or imported from abroad?

We analyze how a country's immigrant population—defined as the stock of people born abroad—affects the probability of a terrorist attack in the host country. Using data for 20 OECD host countries and 183 countries of origin over the 1980–2010 period our OLS and 2SLS regressions show that the probability that immigrants from a specific country of origin conduct a terrorist attack in their host country increases with a larger number of foreigners from such countries living there. However, this scale effect does not differ from the effect domestic populations have on domestic terror. We find scarce evidence that terror is systematically imported from countries with large Muslim populations or countries where terror networks prevail. Policies that exclude foreigners already living in a country increase rather than reduce the risk that foreign populations turn violent, and so do terrorist attacks against foreigners in their host country. Highly skilled migrants are associated with a significantly lower risk of terror compared with low skilled ones, while there is no significant difference between foreign-born men and women.     

‘Flattening’ tax evasion?

We analyze the response of tax evasion to the introduction of a flat tax in several transition economies. Using a novel estimator based on household level data, we show that in most of the countries studied there was no discernible effect on the measured size of unreported income following a flat tax reform. This may imply that decreases in marginal tax rates may frequently have been accompanied by a parallel deterioration in attitudes towards public services and the government in general. The countries that show a response to the flat tax reform appear to be those where satisfaction with government services increased.     

Do foreigners replace native immigrants? A panel cointegration analysis of internal migration in Italy

This paper examines the impact of the immigration of foreigners on domestic labor mobility. Since David Card's seminal study on the regional labor market impact of the Mariel Boatlift it is controversial whether domestic labor mobility equilibrates economic conditions across regions. However, there is little or no evidence that natives leave destinations where migrants tend to cluster. In this paper we reconcile the existing evidence by taking another route: we analyze whether the immigration of foreigners replaces domestic mobility from poor to rich regions. We focus on Italy, which is characterized by large North-South wage and unemployment differentials, and apply panel cointegration methods. The main finding is that, conditional on unemployment and wage differentials, the presence of foreign workers in the labor force of the destination regions discourages internal labor mobility significantly. As a consequence, spatial correlation studies which use the variance of the foreigner share across regions for identifying the wage and employment effects of immigration, tend to understate the actual impact of foreign immigration.     

Foreign Human Capital and Total Factor Productivity: A Sectoral Approach

We analyze the role of migrants in productivity growth in the three largest European countries—France, Germany and the United Kingdom—in the years 1994–2007, using Total Factor Productivity. Unlike previous research, which mainly employs a regional approach, our analysis is at the sectoral level: this allows to distinguish the real contribution of migrants to productivity from possible inter-sectoral complementarities, which might also foster growth. We control for the share of migrants and the different components of human-capital, such as education, age and diversity, and adopt instrumental variables strategies to address the possible endogeneity of migration. The results show that migrants contribute to the productivity of the sectors in which they are employed, but with important differences: highly-educated migrants show a larger positive effect in high-tech sectors, and to a lesser extent in services sector. The diversity of countries of origin contributes to productivity growth only in the services sectors.     

Export rivalry,vertically-related markets,and optimal public ownership policy

This paper considers the optimal public ownership policy of an upstream firm which competes with a foreign private rival. Both firms supply a produced input to the domestic and foreign downstream firms that compete in an export market. The paper shows that complete privatization of the domestic upstream firm is never optimal. It will likely be fully nationalized if its market share is high, the domestic downstream firms' market share is low, and the total number of firms in the downstream is large. Simulation results reveal that the public firm's optimal profit margin may be negative and that the government ownership level may exhibit a reswitching phenomenon as the number of domestic downstream firms keeps growing. The paper sheds light on the possibility of using government ownership policy as a pseudo-trade and industrial policy.     

Migration and labour markets in OECD countries: a panel cointegration approach

This article examines the interaction between immigration and the host labour market of 14 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries using nonstationary panel data methodology. We estimate a trivariate Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) and derive causality tests to simultaneously assess the long- and short-term macroeconomic impact of newcomers on wages and unemployment levels in the host country. The results suggest that an increase of migrants is likely to increase wages in the destination countries in the short run but to increase them in the long run. There is no evidence of adverse effects on unemployment due to immigration in short and long-term except for Anglo-Saxon countries in the short term. Our findings also show that immigration is conditioned by levels of unemployment and wages especially in Anglo-Saxon countries.     

The effect of mode 4 liberalization on illegal immigration

This paper aims to assess the impacts of the temporary movement of workers on the illegal immigration. It uses a discrete time, forward-looking model with heterogeneous agents, in order to describe the decision made by illegal migrants from developing countries. Illegal migrants are supposed to accede only to the informal sector and are price takers, as they have no negotiating power. Taking into account these specifications, the theoretical model is solved analytically and illustrated numerically. It demonstrates that under some conditions, the liberalization of temporary movement of workers could lead to a decrease of illegal migration.