Fertility Assimilation of Immigrants: Evidence from Count Data Models This study applies count data estimation techniques to investigate the fertility adjustment of immigrants in the destination country. Data on completed fertility are taken from the 1996 wave of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP). While the economic literature stresses the role of prices and incomes as determinants of fert...

This study tests the importance of Ricardian technology differences for international trade. The empirical analysis has three comparative advantages: including emerging and advanced economies, isolating panel variation regarding the link between productivity and exports, and exploiting heterogeneous technology diffusion from immigrant communities in the United States for identification. The lat...

How is economic policy made? In this paper we study a key determinant of the answer to the question: lobbying by firms. Estimating a binary choice model of firm behavior, we find significant evidence for the idea that barriers to entry induce persistence in lobbying. The existence of these costs is further confirmed in studying how firms responded to a particular policy change: the expiration o...

Interethnic Marriages and their Economic Effects Immigrants who marry outside of their ethnicity tend to have better economic outcomes than those who marry within ethnicity. It is difficult, however, to interpret this relationship because individuals with stronger preferences for ethnic endogamy are likely to differ in unobserved ways from those with weaker preferences. To clarify some of the c...

A growing body of programme evaluation literature recognises immigrants as a disadvantaged group on European labour markets and investigates the employment effects of Active Labour Market Programmes (ALMPs) on this subgroup. Using a meta-analysis, we condense 93 estimates from 33 empirical studies of the effectiveness of four types of ALMPs employed across Europe to combat immigrant unemploymen...

We investigate determinants of the pattern of recent migration of Alaska Natives between rural homelands and urban areas. A review of the literature on moving in the North American North suggests that economic opportunities draw migrants, although such opportunities must be viewed in the context of the mixed subsistence-cash economy prevailing in rural areas of the region. Consequently, we mode...

Immigration and Housing Rents in American Cities Is there a local economic impact of immigration? Immigration pushes up rents and housing values in US destination cities. The positive association of rent growth and immigrant inflows is pervasive in time series for all metropolitan areas. I use instrumental variables based on a “shift-share” of national levels of immigration into metropolitan ar...

This paper uses a unique panel dataset from China's initial reform of fiscal decentralization to analyze the relationships between fiscal decentralization, local economic development, and rural-rural undocumented inter-provincial labor mobility. Using a modified gravity model with Heckman Maximum Likelihood Estimation method, this paper shows that fiscal decentralization has two contending effe...

Is a Policy of Free Movement of Workers Sustainable? This paper studies the costs and benefits of the adoption of the policy of free movement for workers. For the countries to agree on uncontrolled movement of workers, the short run costs must be outweighed by the long term benefits that result from better labor market flexibility and income smoothing. We show that such policies are less likely...

How Outsourcing Affects Bilateral Political Relations One issue the literature neglects is how outsourcing stimulates trade (imports, exports and foreign direct investment), thereby affecting political relations. However, at least as far back as 1750, economic philosophers such as Baron de Montesquieu in his L’Esprit des Lois, argued, “peace is the natural effect of trade.” This paper first rev...