Human capital,migration strategy,and brain drain

Abstract

This research was motivated by the increasing number of foreign students and scientists who are in the United States on temporary visas and who are able to change their status to permanent immigrant. Origin countries, among them industrialized western European nations, are concerned about losing many of their best-educated and most talented citizens. This article modifies and extends a theoretical model of optimal human capital investment before and after migration to shed new light on the emigration/immigration of the highly skilled, and explores some possible implications for the study of the so-called ‘brain drain’ phenomenon.     

中国服务业企业出口与生产率关系——自我选择效应还是出口学习效应

本文采用2011年中国服务业上市企业数据对企业与生产率的"自我选择"及"出口中学"效应进行实证检验,结果表明:(1)出口是中国服务业企业生产率提升的重要影响因素,同时企业生产率的提升也促进了出口规模的扩大;(2)在分所有制企业的检验中,只有国有企业均支持"自我选择"和"出口中学"假说,而非国有企业只支持"出口中学"假说。中国应该推动服务贸易发展,及时推进国有企业改革,落实反垄断政策。     

对外直接投资与企业生产率——基于中国上市公司的实证分析

文章先利用K-S检验研究中国制造类上市公司的全要素生产率分布,结果与HMY模型的预期一致,对外直接投资企业的全要素生产率分布显著优于出口企业和仅在国内生产销售的企业。进一步探讨对外直接投资与生产率的关系,结果表明,企业在进行对外直接投资时不存在显著的自我选择效应,但是,对外直接投资能够促进企业生产率的提高,具有学习效应。     

The interactions among foreign direct investment,economic growth,degree of openness and unemployment in Taiwan

The vector autoregression method of variance decomposition and impulse response function analysis are applied to analyse various relationships among foreign direct investment (FDI), economic growth, unemployment and degree of openness in Taiwan. The analysis results show that these five variables have a long-run equilibrium relationship; however, unemployment rate and FDI outflow have weak exogeneity. We also found that there exist three unidirectional causalities from FDI outflow to FDI inflow, from economic growth to degree of openness, and from economic growth to unemployment in short-run. Furthermore, the shocks of economic growth and degree of openness have positive effects on FDI inflow. On the contrary, the shocks in economic growth and FDI inflow have negative effects on unemployment rate.     

Nonlinear taxation and punishment

The paper analyzes nonlinear tax schedules that are identified by maximizing a welfare function represented by a weighted summation of net utilities over a set of n  ≥ 3 differing individuals. It is demonstrated that some of the feasible and Pareto efficient tax schedules that satisfy self-selection can only be identified by maximizing a welfare function of the above form if (at least) one of the individuals in the economy is assigned a negative weight.     

Encouragement Designs: An Approach to Self-Selected Samples in an Experimental Design

When subjects choose their own treatment (are self-selected into treatments based on their varying compliance with assignment to treatment states), many of the well-developed techniques of randomization-based experimental design and analysis are no longer applicable. With random assignment to treatment and control conditions, we can reasonable assume that over many replications, the two groups will be similar in all respects (observed and not observed) but that of receiving the treatment. With non-random assignment, it may be true that the groups differ on the variable of interest prior to receiving the treatment, and that a measured post-treatment difference (or lack thereof) will be erroneously attributed to the treatment. Our approach involves making all subjects aware of the availability of the treatment, but then offering extra encouragement (an encouragement design) to participate in the treatment to a randomly selected half of the population. If the encouragement is successful, we show how this leads to an estimable treatment effect (with associated asymptotic standard error).An illustrative example using fictitious data is presented in which we measure the effects of coupon books on store purchase behavior. A randomly selected half of the customers at a given store are assigned to receive coupon books as part of a package of store materials (the treatment condition) whereas the other half are not. We overlay on this initial randomized design an encouragement condition in which a second randomly chosen half of the store's customers receive their materials from an employee (encouraging participation with the treatment), and for the other half the materials were simply placed on a table. The market share of persons who chose to take the coupon book was 44% and 20% from those who did not. A naive estimate of the effect of the treatment is 24%; however this estimate ignores the self-selection bias (those persons assigned to receive the coupon book but refused to take it, and those not assigned who picked one up anyway). Using the encouragement design estimator derived leads to a lower estimated impact of the treatment at 5%. The difference in these results may have significant impact on the choice by store management to utilize employees to hand out promotional materials.Eric T. Bradlow is Assistant Professor of Marketing and Statistics     

Exports,investment and production growth: A dynamic heterogeneous firm model with learning and entry costs

We analyze a firm’s joint decision to export and invest using a model that incorporates the essential features of self-selection and learning-by-exporting theories of firm-level dynamics. We calibrate the model to 2002–2007 Chilean manufacturing plant data and simulate it under different assumptions, finding that neither self-selection nor learning-by-exporting alone can adequately explain the observed cross-sectional relationship between firm level exports and capital, favoring instead a model that allows both mechanisms to work in tandem.     

Do public banks have a competitive advantage?

Public banks are often blamed to possess an unfair competitive advantage in the form of lower funding costs due to a state guarantee on their deposits. However, public and private banks tend to differ not only in their funding costs, but also in the way they deal with borrowers in financial distress. The model presented in this paper shows that if banks differ in these two characteristics, a separation of borrowers may result, with public banks lending to risky firms and private banks lending to safe firms. This separation can explain differences in the lending behavior and performance of public and private banks as observed in the market. Interestingly, the separation may persist even when funding costs are equal, implying that an abolition of state guarantees will not necessarily lead to identical performance of the two types of banks.