Immigrant earnings: age at immigration matters

A correlation between age at immigration and earnings is observed in Canadian census data. The evidence supports three underlying sources of the effect; first, work experience in the source country yields virtually no return in the host country; second, the return to education varies with age at immigration, and, finally, an 'acculturation' effect is observed for immigrants who are visible minorities or whose mother tongue is not English. Further, it is found that educational attainment, and relatedly earnings, vary systematically across age at immigration with those arriving around age 15 to 18 obtaining fewer years of education. JEL Classification: J61, J31     

Making Benefit Transfers Work: Deriving and Testing Principles for Value Transfers for Similar and Dissimilar Sites Using a Case Study of the Non-Market Benefits of Water Quality Improvements Across Europe

We implement a controlled, multi-site experiment to develop and test guidance principles for benefits transfers. These argue that when transferring across relatively similar sites, simple mean value transfers are to be preferred but that when sites are relatively dissimilar then value function transfers will yield lower errors. The paper also provides guidance on the appropriate specification of transferable value functions arguing that these should be developed from theoretical rather than ad-hoc statistical approaches. These principles are tested via a common format valuation study of water quality improvements across five countries. While this provides an idealised tested, results support the above principles and suggest directions for future transfer studies.     

Distributional inference

The making of statistical inferences in distributional form is conceptionally complicated because the epistemic 'probabilities' assigned are mixtures of fact and fiction. In this respect they are essentially different from 'physical' or 'frequency-theoretic' probabilities. The distributional form is so attractive and useful, however, that it should be pursued. Our approach is In line with Walds theory of statistical decision functions and with Lehmann's books about hypothesis testing and point estimation: loss functions are defined, risk functions are studied, unbiasedness and equivariance restrictions are made, etc. A central theme is that the loss function should be 'proper'. This fundamental concept has been explored by meteorologists, psychometrists, Bayesian statisticians, and others. The paper should be regarded as an attempt to reconcile various schools of statisticians. By accepting what we regard 88 good and useful in the various approaches we are trying to develop a nondogmatic approach.     

Canadian wage controls in an eclectic model of wage determination

Using a model of wage determination that allows for wage inertia, price expectational and price catch-up influences and quarterly data on annual wage change in new major Canadian settlements for 1967–1987, this paper shows that the Anti-Inflation Board (AIB) wage control programme has a much larger wage restraining influence than is estimated in previous studies. In contrast, the Six and Five wage control programme exerts only a modest restraining influence. Both results are of special interest because the wage determination model used here allows for not only the direct effect of wage controls, but also the indirect wage restraining effect of controls operating through lagged wage changes. We would like to thank two anonymous referees and the editor of this Journal for helpful comments on the work reported in this paper. We also want to acknowledge with thanks the very able research assistance provided by James Chu, Ann Holmes, and Graham Voss and the financial assistance provided by Career Access and Challenge grants from Employment and Immigration Canada and University of Victoria Faculty Research Grants.     

Reflections on Fourteen Cryptic Issues Concerning the Nature of Statistical Inference*

The present paper provides the original formulation and a joint response of a group of statistically trained scientists to fourteen cryptic issues for discussion, which were handed out to the public by Professor Dr. D.R. Cox after his Bernoulli Lecture 1997 at Groningen University.     

Estimation in a growth study with irregular measurement times

Between 1982 and 1988 a growth study was carried out at the Division of Pediatric Oncology of the University Hospital of Groningen. A special feature of the project was that sample sizes are small and that ages at entry may be very different. In addition the intended design was not fully complied with. This paper highlights some aspects of the statistical analysis which is based on (1) reference scores, (2) statistical procedures allowing for an irregular pattern of measurement times caused by missing data and shifted measurement times.     

Using Meta-Analysis and GIS for Value Transfer and Scaling Up: Valuing Climate Change Induced Losses of European Wetlands

There is growing policy and academic interest in transferring ecosystem service values from existing valuation studies to other ecosystem sites at a large geographic scale. Despite the evident policy demand for this combined transfer and “scaling up” of values, an approach to value transfer that addresses the challenges inherent in assessing ecosystem changes at a national or regional level is not available. This paper proposes a methodology for scaling up ecosystem service values to estimate the welfare effects of ecosystem change at this larger geographical scale. The methodology is illustrated by applying it to value the impact of climate change on European wetlands for the period 2000–2050. The proposed methodology makes use of meta-analysis to produce a value function. The parameters of the value function include spatial variables on wetland size and abundance, GDP per capita, and population. A geographic information system is used to construct a database of wetland sites in the case study region with information on these spatial variables. Site-specific ecosystem service values are subsequently estimated using the meta-analytic value function. The proposed method is shown to enable the adjustment of transferred values to reflect variation in important spatial variables and to account for changes in the stock of ecosystems.     

Estimating a frequency unseen: an application to ornithology

The second author is involved in a capture–mark–recapture study of some wader species. Part of his program deals with resight observations. On a particular day he visually inspects a fairly stable population to identify the ringed birds by reading their ring-number. Some ringed birds will be missed, so observations are repeated on other days. The issue of main interest is whether, after some repetitions, we can be sufficiently sure that all the ringed birds in the population have been identified or, equivalently, that the frequency of unseen birds is zero.
Most current theory is concerned with an asymptotic setting. In our 'exact' context the emphasis is on the determination of the 'probability' that the frequency of unseen birds is zero. This issue is settled by considering the more general problem of 'estimating' the frequency of the unseen birds by providing a predictive inference in the form of a probability distribution. We develop methods of inference based on the assumption of a bird-independent probability p _i of identifying a ringed bird on day i , as well as without this assumption. In Section 5 we critically examine these approaches.