Changes in US Immigration laws that occurred during the mid 1980s to the late 1990s led to a sharp increase in criminal deportations. Using panel data for a sample of 38 developed and developing countries, I provide evidence for a statistically significantly positive causal relationship between increases in the numbers of criminal deportees and increases in intentional homicide rates. The magni...

Measurement error causes a downward bias when estimating a panel data linear regression model. The panel data context offers various opportunities to derive moment conditions that result in consistent GMM estimators. We consider three sources of moment conditions: (i) restrictions on the intertemporal covariance matrix of the errors in the equations, (ii) heteroskedasticity and nonlinearity in ...

The Easterlin hypothesis emphasizes the effect of relative cohort size on fertility. Models based on the Easterlin hypothesis have performed well in explaining time series fertility data, although these results have been for long historical time series and have typically been restricted to single country studies. These models are not adequate to determine if the hypothesis still holds and if th...

Do Labour Market Institutions Matter? Micro-Level Wage Effects of International Outsourcing in Three European Countries This paper studies the impact of outsourcing on individual wages in three European countries with markedly different labour market institutions: Germany, the UK and Denmark. To do so we use individual level data sets for the three countries and construct comparable measures of...

Following the present atmosphere of budgetary cuts we analyze the effects of fiscal consolidation on the composition of government expenditures by functions. Using a dynamic voter group decision model and exploiting the panel structure of the dataset – 26 OECD countries over the period 1970-1997by GMM estimation we find that fiscal adjustments protect social expenditure. Nevertheless, we find t...

Intergenerational Mobility: Trends Across the Earnings Distribution The analysis, based on register data for Norwegian cohorts born 1950, 1955, and 1960, shows that the intergenerational earnings mobility is high. Using quantile regression, mobility is found to be lower at the lower end of the earnings distribution than at the upper end. The findings also indicate that mobility increases over t...

We develop a horizontal R&D growth model that allows us to investigate the different channels through which financial reforms affect investment and patent activity. First, “micro” reform abolishes barriers entry in banking sector produces straightforward result: decrease lending rates stimulates economic growth. Second, “macro” removes restrictions on banks’ reserves credit controls. While this...

Importing Equality? The Impact of Globalization on Gender Discrimination While researchers have long held that discrimination cannot endure in an increasingly competitive environment, there has been little work testing this dynamic process. This paper tests the hypothesis (based on Becker 1957) that increased competition resulting from globalization in the 1980s forced employers to reduce costl...

This paper employs non-parametric specification tests developed in Hong and Li (2005) to evaluate several one-factor reduced-form credit risk models for actual default intensities. Using estimates for actual default probabilities provided by Moody’s KMV from 1994 to 2005 for 106 U.S. firms in seven industry groups, we strongly reject popular univariate affine model specifications. As a good com...