Liquidity-constrained migrants

Liquidity constraints represent a major obstacle for potential migrants trying to meet the high cost of undocumented international migration. Some cover it by borrowing from a smuggling organization with a commitment to repay the loan by working in the destination country as bonded laborers. This paper compares alternative ways of financing migration and shows that debt bondage is optimal only if the international wage differential is sufficiently large in relation to migration costs. Tougher border controls as well as internal enforcement measures can be expected to reduce the incidence of debt-bonded relative to self-financed migration, although they may not necessarily lower the overall inflow of illegal aliens.     

Two perspectives on multiskilling and product-market volatility

We study the effect of product-market volatility on a firm's choice between multiskilling and specialization. We construct a theoretical model that captures the tradeoff between multiskilling (which gives greater flexibility to reassign workers in production) and specialization (which provides workers with the expertise to respond to product market signals in their area of specialty). Using data from a nationally-representative cross section of British establishments, we find that greater volatility is associated with greater specialization. This result holds both inside and outside of manufacturing, but consistent with our model, it holds only in multi-product establishments and not in single-product ones.     

Informal employment relationships and the labor market: Is there segmentation in Ukraine?

One of the most important factors that determine individuals’ quality of life and wellbeing is their position in the labor market and the type of jobs that they hold. When workers are rationed out of the formal segment of the labor market against their will, i.e., the labor market is segmented, their quality of life is limited, and their wellbeing is reduced. When they can freely choose between a formal or informal employment relationship, i.e., the labor market is integrated, their wellbeing can reach high levels even in the presence of informal employment. We, therefore, test whether the Ukrainian labor market is segmented along the formal-informal divide, slicing the data by gender and age. The analysis that we perform consist in the analysis of short-term and medium-term transitions between five employment states, unemployment and inactivity. We also analyze wage gaps of mean hourly earnings and across the entire hourly earnings distribution, controlling for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity. According to our results segmentation is present for dependent employees: for a large part of informal employees informal employment is used as a waiting stage to enter formal salaried employment and is not voluntarily chosen. As far as self-employment is concerned the evidence is mixed regarding segmentation in the Ukrainian labor market. This heterogeneity in outcomes implies that not all informal work is associated with a low quality of life and reduced wellbeing in post-transition economies.     

Commercial corporate governance ratings: an alternative view of their use and impact

The rise in the popularity of commercial corporate governance ratings is at once a source of dismay and a cause for alarm: the former because they do not appear to give accurate predictions of corporate performance and the latter because they add to the pressure on corporations to adapt their governance structures to a benchmark model that takes no account of the conditions in which they operate. This paper gives an alternative view of the potential use and impact of the commercially marketed governance ratings. It argues that their importance to institutional investors lies in providing them with information that accurately summarises corporate loyalty to shareholders rather than accurately predicts corporate performance. It goes on to argue that the commercial governance ratings can bring benefits to an economy by contributing to a new type of managerial control mechanism that is not only more efficient than hostile takeovers and stock options but also helps to reduce the governance role of these instruments.     

J2EE技术开发应用中的"陷阱"及对策

作为当今最热门的企业级开发平台之一的J2EE，以其实现分布式计算及提供对企业级应用的强大支持获得了众多软件厂商的青睐，但在实际的J2EE项目开发中却布满大量的开发陷阱，如模型与代码间存在隔阂，Web开发效率不高，中间层设计较混乱等。针对这三种陷阱应采取相应对策，才能克服J2EE开发中的缺点。     

The redistributive effects of political reservation for minorities: Evidence from India

We examine the impact of political reservation for disadvantaged minority groups on poverty. To address the concern that political reservation is endogenous, we take advantage of the state-time variation in reservation in state legislative assemblies in India generated by national policies that cause reservations to be revised and the time lags with which revised reservations are implemented. Using data on sixteen major Indian states for the period 1960-2000, we find that increasing the share of seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes significantly reduces poverty while increasing the share of seats reserved for Scheduled Castes has no impact on poverty. Political reservation for Scheduled Tribes has a greater effect on rural poverty than urban poverty, and appears to benefit people near the poverty line as well as those far below it.