Openness and income: The roles of trade and migration

This paper explores the relationship between openness to trade, immigration, and income per person across countries. To address endogeneity concerns we extend the instrumental-variables strategy introduced by Frankel and Romer (1999). We build predictors of openness to immigration and to trade for each country by using information on bilateral geographical and cultural distance (while controlling for country size). Since geography may affect income through other channels, we also control for climate, disease environment, natural resources, and colonial origins. Most importantly, we also account for the roles of institutions and early development. Our instrumental-variables estimates provide evidence of a robust, positive effect of openness to immigration on long-run income per capita. In contrast, we are unable to establish an effect of trade openness on income. We also show that the effect of migration operates through an increase in total factor productivity, which appears to reflect increased diversity in productive skills and, to some extent, a higher rate of innovation.     

University entrepreneurship centres as service businesses

In recent years, many universities have created entrepreneurship centres which offer a set of services to students, educators and professionals in order to promote entrepreneurial attitudes. The first part of this work focuses on describing a university entrepreneurship programme as a service business. The second part summarises the results of the empirical study, based on the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ) questionnaire administered to 106 students at the Technical University of Catalonia in Spain who attended the entrepreneurship courses offered by the Innova Programme entrepreneurship centre.     

Labor-market exposure as a determinant of attitudes toward immigration

This paper re-examines the role of labor-market competition as a determinant of attitudes toward immigration. We claim two main contributions. First, we use more sophisticated measures of the degree of exposure to competition from immigrants than previously done. In addition to education, we focus on the protection derived from (self-assessed) investments in job-specific human capital and from specialization in occupations that are (objectively) intensive in communication tasks. Second, we explicitly account for the potential endogeneity arising from job search. Methodologically, we estimate by instrumental variables, an econometric model that allows for heterogeneity at the individual, regional and country level. Drawing on the 2004–2005 European Social Survey, we obtain the following main results. First, natives that dislike immigrants tend to work in low-immigration jobs, biasing OLS estimates. Second, working in jobs that require high levels of specific human capital leads to relatively more pro-immigration attitudes, although this effect is only found for respondents with more than 12 years of schooling. Third, the degree of manual (communicational) intensity of workers' occupations has a negative (positive) effect on their pro-immigration views. This effect is the most significant, both in a statistical and in a quantitative sense, and is distinct from the protection from immigrant competition provided by formal education. Overall our results suggest a large role for skill-based labor market competition in determining individual attitudes toward immigration.     

Credible redistribution policy and skilled migration

We analyze the joint determination of income redistribution and migration flows across fiscally independent regions. In our model, regional governments lack commitment so their policy announcements must be credible, and redistribution between skilled and unskilled workers is bounded by informational constraints. In any given region, the welfare of all workers is increasing in the share of skilled workers, as after-tax incomes increase for both skilled and unskilled workers. When skilled workers are more geographically mobile than unskilled ones, the endogenous response of redistribution policy can induce regional agglomeration of skilled workers. We also find that the equilibrium features symmetry-breaking if migration costs are relatively low; and that worker mobility tends to amplify pre-existing welfare differences in income and welfare across regions.     

Does direct experience matter? Examining the consequences of current entrepreneurial behavior on entrepreneurial intention

Entrepreneurial behavior research has used intention models to explain how an individual’s beliefs shape the attitudes and motivations that influence entrepreneurial intention. Nevertheless, as entrepreneurship promotion initiatives become global, it becomes relevant to explore the consequences of being engaged in entrepreneurial behavior on entrepreneurial intention. We aim to shed light on whether the direct experience reinforces an individual’s entrepreneurial intention or reduces it. Building on an extended version of the planned behavior theory, we use the behavioral reasoning theory to propose a research design to study the influence of being currently engaged in entrepreneurial behavior on entrepreneurial intention. We introduce individual’s age as an additional moderator of the effects of directly experiencing entrepreneurial behavior. We use PLS-MGA to complete a multi-group SEM analysis for different groups of individuals (from a sample of 430), comparing groups based on their entrepreneurial activity and age group. Results of this research work evidence that current engagement in entrepreneurship activities produces significant differences in the intention to start a new venture between older and younger participants. The results suggest that engagement in entrepreneurial activity modifies entrepreneurial intention and that these effects are contingent to the individual’s age. This research work contributes to the extant call to explore reverse causality between actual behavior and an individual’s intention by introducing behavioral reasoning theory. These results provide support to initiatives to adapt entrepreneurship promotion efforts to the specific characteristics of the participants.     

Efficiency and Environmental Regulation

This paper proposes an extension of the enhancedefficiency indices of Färe, Grosskopf, Lovell andPasurka (1989) that considers undesirable outputsasymmetrically by assuming that firms can freelydispose of some undesirable productions, but areduction of other bad outputs generates a cost interms of desirable outputs. This methodologicalapproach is used to analyse the relative efficiency ofa sample of Spanish producers of wooden goods andfurnishings whose production process generates fourdifferent wastes. We obtain efficiency indices thatserve to measure the impact on firm performance inseveral scenarios related to environmental regulationsaimed to reduce the production of wastes. Whenenvironmental regulations are assumed, it is foundthat firms would have to sacrifice important amountsof potential desirable output in order to reallocateinputs into waste reduction. Secondly, we find thatfirms associated with a Technological Institute aswell as firms located at a marshallian type industrialdistrict are likely to be less affected byregulations.     

The vulnerability of destinations to climate change: A comparative analysis of contextual socio-political factors

Climate change affects tourism and tourism affects climate change. Thus, both adaptation and mitigation strategies are needed to guarantee the sustainability of destinations. As well as the direct impacts of climate change, the effectiveness of these strategies determines the vulnerability of destinations. This paper compares the Riviera Maya (Mexican Caribbean) and Alt Maresme (Spanish Mediterranean) to identify the contextual socio-political factors that influence the vulnerability of destinations to climate change. Thirty-six semi-structured interviews were conducted with key stakeholders from tourism and the environment, public organizations, NGOs, and different levels of the public administration at both destinations. This research focuses on the perception of risk and agenda setting, the stakeholders’ involvement and the limitations of public action. The results show that awareness is greater, climate change is more important to the tourism agenda and private organizations are more involved in the Riviera Maya than in Alt Maresme. Five socio-political aspects are identified and discussed to explain the results: the destination’s evolution; the characteristics and evolution of tourism policy; extreme meteorological events as breaking points for policies; the socioeconomic context and the dependence on tourism; and the characteristics of the tourism offer, such as the dependence on natural resources and seasonality.