Optimal immigration, education and growth in the long run

The paper extends Manning's model on education and balanced growth to include labour immigration. Each immigration unit is assumed to consist of one skilled worker and some unskilled members. The optimal immigration policy which maximizes the per capita steady-state consumption of the host country is derived. We show that optimal immigration policy can reduce the steady-state skilled labour ratio. More interesting still, contrary to the widespread belief that immigration of skilled workers hurts local skilled workers, it is the unskilled local workers whose interests are threatened by optimal immigration policy.     

The Post-Issue Operating Performance of IPO Firms

This article investigates the change in operating performance of firms as they make the transition from private to public ownership. A significant decline in operating performance subsequent to the initial public offering (IPO) is found. Additionally, there is a significant positive relation between post-IPO operating performance and equity retention by the original entrepreneurs, but no relation between post-IPO operating performance and the level of initial underpricing. Post-issue declines in the market-to-book ratio, price/earnings ratio, and earnings per share are also documented.     

Programme Evaluation with Unobserved Heterogeneity and Selective Implementation: The Mexican PROGRESA Impact on Child Nutrition

This paper considers the impact of Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentación ( PROGRESA ), a large Mexican rural anti-poverty programme that had an evaluation sample in which overall treatment was randomly assigned to some communities but not others, on child nutrition. When we examine the impact of PROGRESA based on the presumption of randomized allocations, we find that PROGRESA had no or even a negative impact on child nutrition. However, not all children designated to receive nutritional supplements actually did so. Our preferred estimates – child fixed-effects estimates that control for unobserved heterogeneity that is correlated with access to the supplement – indicate a significantly positive and fairly substantial programme effect of the nutritional supplements on children 12–36 months. They imply an increase of about a sixth in mean growth per year for these children and a lower probability of stunting. Effects are somewhat larger for children from poorer communities but whose mothers are functionally literate. The long-term consequences of these improvements are non-trivial; its impact working through adult height alone could result in a 2.9% increase in lifetime earnings.     

The distributional impact of unification and the 1992–93 recession on West German households

The 1992–93 recession in the western states of Germany has been attributed, in substantial measure, to the macroeconomic consequences of policies to finance unification. Studies of the costs of unification have not attempted to measure the burden of the recession. We estimate a dynamic, panel model of household incomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and use it to forecast what these incomes would have been in 1992–94 without a recession. Using a ratio of actual to forecast incomes, we compare the relative burden of the recession across households. Our findings suggest that western households below the median income bore the brunt of the combined impact of unification and the recession of 1992–93.
JEL classification: P3, D3, E3.     

E-Business Transformation via Alliance Clusters

The number of firms using alliances as part of their corporate venturing or market entry strategies has surged over the past decade. Three common reasons cited for pursuing alliances are technology convergence, market access and alliance partners' complementary resources. This paper contrasts the alliance strategies of HP and IBM, two major competitors in electronic services (i.e. Internet-based 'e- service') businesses, using the Familiarity Matrix as a display tool to portray the strategies. Whereas the HP strategy is to attempt to establish its technology infrastructure as the standard e-services infrastructure on the Internet, IBM aims to position its IBM Global Services, rather than its technology, at the center of this ecosystem.     

Worker separations in a nonstationary corporate environment

Assessing ten years of unique personnel data from a large firm, this paper investigates how determinants of worker turnover differ between periods of corporate expansion and decline. Performance and career progress considerably reduce the hazard of job separation during downsizing for blue-collar workers, but are less important for white-collar workers. Effects of firm-tenure, occupation, education, training, part-time status, and gender are largely in accordance with the implications from existing models. But no model generates all patterns observed in the data. Age effects are sensitive to retirement options and discontinuous, dropping in response to the anticipation of becoming eligible for early retirement during downsizing and jumping at the actual retirement age.     

Allocating an advertising budget to international travel markets

Deciding on advertising appropriations is a common problem to all National Tourist Offices. The Austrian National Tourist Office now employs a decision support model allowing for inclusion of managerial judgments. In tourism, like elsewhere, application of standard optimization routines to marketing decision making is straight- forward, once the relationship linking market response to input has been modeled adequately. A tailor-made decision calculus procedure eliciting managerial judgments on the relative importance of the factors determining a receiving country's travel market share provides the weights otherwise inaccessible by objective parameter estimation. A tourism manager thus can evaluate countries as tourism generators and allocate an advertising budget accordingly.     

Exit Options in Corporate Finance: Liquidity versus Incentives

This paper provides a first study of the optimal design of active monitors'exit options in a problem involving a demand for liquidity and costly monitoring of the issuer. Optimal incentives to monitor the issuer may involve restricting the monitor's right to sell her claims on the firm's cash-flow early. But the monitor will then require a liquidity premium for holding such an illiquid claim. In general, therefore, there will be a trade off between incentives and liquidity. The paper highlights a fundamental complementarity between speculative monitoring in financial markets (which increases the informativeness of prices) and active monitoring inside the firm: in financial markets where price discovery is better and securities prices reflect the fundamentals of the issuer better, the incentive cost of greater liquidity may be smaller and active monitoring incentives may be preserved. The paper spells out the conditions under which more or less liquidity is warranted and applies the analysis to shed light on common exit provisions in venture capital financing.