Author Abstract: The at-risk-of-poverty rate, the relative income poverty indicator applied in the EU, can be highly sensitive to the equivalence scale used to transform household income to an equivalent for individuals. This study applies two well-established approaches to estimate the equivalence scale: an ‘objective’ one, based on consumption expenditures available in the national Household Budget Survey, and a ‘subjective’ one, based on the Minimum Income Question available in EU-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data. The aim is to contrast the two estimated equivalence scales in the Czech Republic in the 2006-2016 period with the OECD-modified scale applied uniformly for decades across the EU countries. Our findings suggest that the adult weight in the equivalence scale is decreasing over time, while the child weight is relatively stable under both approaches. The estimated weights are lower than the officially applied ones, with the exception of the expenditure-based adult weight, which is very close to the OECD-modified weight. Applying the estimated scales affects the income poverty rate and leads to different rates than the official ones: while the trend of the rates is similar when the two estimated scales are used, the official income poverty rate deviates from those two.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper examines the impact of U.S governor’s party allegiance (Republican vs Democrat) on the ethnic wage gap to show that the vast majority of subgroups of black workers earnings are not affected by democrat governors’ policies.
Author Abstract: Income inequality is a distributional phenomenon. This paper examines the impact of U.S governor’s party allegiance (Republican vs Democrat) on ethnic wage gap. A descriptive analysis of the distribution of yearly earnings of Whites and Blacks reveals a divergence in their respective shapes over time suggesting that aggregate analysis may mask important heterogeneous effects. This motivates a granular estimation of the comparative causal effect of governors’ party affiliation on labor market outcomes. We use a regression discontinuity design (RDD) based on marginal electoral victories and samples of quantiles groups by wage and hours worked. Overall, the distributional causal estimations show that the vast majority of subgroups of black workers earnings are not affected by democrat governors’ policies, suggesting the possible existence of structural factors in the labor markets that contribute to create and keep a wage trap and/or hour worked trap for most of the subgroups of black workers. Democrat governors increase the number of hours worked of black workers at the highest quartiles of earnings. A bivariate quantiles groups analysis shows that democrats decrease the total hours worked for black workers who have the largest number of hours worked and earn the least. Black workers earning more and working fewer hours than half of the sample see their number of hours worked increase under a democrat governor.
Related paper in the Journal of Population Economics, ONLINE FIRST 2021, FREE READ LINK: The effect of the 2016 United States presidential election on employment discrimination by Marina Mileo Gorzig & Deborah Rho
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper studies sealed-bid public procurement contract (PPC) auctions of construction works, discontinuity in bidders’ win margin and firms’ daily employment variation to provide a causal estimate of winning a PPC on firms’ employment.
Author Abstract: Public procurement contracts (PPCs) of goods, services and works is about one tenth of global gross domestic product. Much research has been conducted on government spending and its aggregate effects, but evidence is scarce at the micro-level. This study exploits sealed-bid PPC auctions of construction works, discontinuity in bidders’ win margin and firms’ daily employment variation to provide a causal estimate of winning a PPC on firms’ employment. Winning a PPC has a small positive impact on a firm’s short-run employment. The study investigates mechanisms and heterogeneity that can explain the initial small magnitudes. No compelling evidence is found in favour of political connections, an information leakage channel or PPC size as explanations for the small magnitude. A investigation of longer period shows the impact phases out in less than a year. The lack of a long-term impact is due to runners-up winning more PPCs and runners-up substituting towards more market revenue in the year after closely losing a PPC. Finally, the impacts are concentrated in construction firms that conduct the majority of contracted work in-house. The final estimation shows the effect is about four new employees per PPC with a public cost per job created at €45,200 [€34,200 – €66,200].
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper shows evidence of a large spatial heterogeneity in the electric power consumption between districts and provinces in Vietnam.
Author Abstract: Our study uses a small area estimation method to estimate the average and inequality of per capita kWh consumption for small areas in Vietnam. It shows evidence of a large spatial heterogeneity in the electric power consumption between districts and provinces in Vietnam. Households in the mountains and highlands consumed remarkably less electricity than those in the delta and coastal areas. Notably, we find a U-shaped relationship between the inequality of electricity consumption and economic levels in Vietnam. In poor districts and provinces, there is very high inequality in electricity consumption. Inequality is lower in middle-income districts and provinces.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper finds substantial and rising gaps in the measurement of consumption and income based on household surveys and national accounts data.
Author Abstract: Estimates of average per capita consumption and income from national accounts differ substantially from corresponding measures of consumption and income from household surveys. Using a new compilation of more than 2,000 household surveys matched to national accounts data, we find that the gaps between the data sources are larger and more robust than previously established. Means of household consumption estimated from surveys are, on average, 20 percent lower than corresponding means from national accounts. The gap with GDP per capita is nearly 50 percent. The gaps have increased in recent decades and are largest in middle-income countries, where annualized growth rates for consumption surveys are systematically lower than national accounts growth rates. We show that the gaps in measures across these two sources have implications for assessments of economic growth, poverty, and inequality. We find that typical survey measures of consumption and income may exaggerate poverty reduction and underestimate inequality.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper explores the important contributions that happiness-in-the-lab experiments can make to the debates about stylized facts by testing the causality of the relationships.
Author Abstract: The recent surge in analyses of subjective well-being (SWB) and the economics of happiness using large observational datasets has generated stylized facts about the relationship between SWB and various correlates. Because such studies are mostly concerned with the determinants of SWB, the modeling utilized assumes SWB to be the dependent variable. Often, selection effects, reverse causality, and omitted variable bias cannot adequately be controlled for, calling many of the stylized facts into question. This chapter explores the important contributions that happiness-in-the-lab experiments can make to the debates about stylized facts by testing the causality of the relationship between SWB and its correlates. A distinction is made between happiness-in-the-lab experiments in which SWB is a dependent versus independent variable, and methods for both types of experiments are discussed, along with a discussion of the limitations inherent in such experiments. The extant happiness-in-the-lab literature is reviewed and future directions for happiness-in the-lab research are proposed. The important role that happiness-inthe- lab experiments can play in the development of national SWB accounting is emphasized.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: Recent evidence suggests that automation technologies entail a trade-off between productivity gains and employment losses for the economies that adopt them. This paper casts doubts on this trade-off in the context of a developing country. It shows significant productivity and employment gains from automation in Indonesian manufacturing during the years 2008-2015, a period of rapid increase in robot imports. Analysis based on manufacturing plant data provides evidence of two plausible reasons for the absence of this trade-off. First, it documents the presence of diminishing productivity returns to robot adoption. As a result, the benefits from automation could be particularly large for countries at early stages of adoption, such as Indonesia. Second, the analysis finds significant positive employment spillovers from automation in downstream plants. Such effects are likely larger in countries such as Indonesia, where the foreign content of manufacturing production is low. Suggestive evidence indicates such results could apply to developing countries more generally.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Klaus F. Zimmermann (GLO & UNU-MERIT) will speak on 12 October 2021 in an online talk at the University of Economics, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Vietnam, as part of the JABES Seminar Talks on Globalization, Political Regimes and the Covid-19 Pandemic. He will report about some of his recent studies in the field and explore the challenges for economic research studying the implications of the pandemic.
Gokhan Karabulut, Klaus F. Zimmermann, Mehmet Huseyin Bilgin and Asli Cansin Doker (2021), “Democracy and COVID-19 Outcomes”, Economics Letters (EL-Prepublication, EL-Online Appendix) Volume 203, June 2021, 109840 Open Access; free PDF. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2021.109840
Author Abstract: What drives investment in automation technologies? This paper documents a positive relationship between labor-friendly institutions and investment in industrial robots in a sample of developing and advanced economies. Institutions explain a substantial share of cross-country variation in automation. The relationship between institutions and robots is stronger in sunk cost-intensive industries, where producers are vulnerable to holdup. The result suggests that one reason for producers to invest in automation is to thwart rent appropriation by labor. As a consequence, policies aimed at supporting workers’ welfare by increasing their bargaining power might actually reduce their employment opportunities.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
The 37th EBES Conference takes place online on October 6-8 2021. GLO is a co-organizing partner, and FOM University of Applied Sciences is the local host supporting the event from Berlin.EBES, theEurasia Business and Economics Society, and FOM University of Applied Sciencesare strategic partners and institutional supporters of GLO.
Day TWO (October 7) saw next to 9 parallel research paper sessions a Special FOM-GLO Session and the GLO Handbook Session Migration I. The highlight plenary Speech of the Day was delivered by Sriya Iyer (University of Cambridge and GLO) on Religion and Mental Health chaired by Olga Popova (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, CERGE-EI & GLO), who is also the GLO Research Cluster Lead “Religion”. The EBES 37 Plenary Speech was this time joint with the monthly GLO Virtual Research Seminar normally chaired by GLO Director Matloob Piracha.
CONFERENCE PROGRAM WITH PARTICIPATION DETAILS: LINK
Monika Wohlmann (FOM University of Applied Science): The European Central Bank’s Strategy Review and the Management of Inflation Expectations
Sascha Frohwerk (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam and GLO): Retail Location Choice Models. A Comparison of Gravitation and Logit Model
Andreas Oberheitmann (Tsinghua University, FOM and GLO): Development of a Low Carbon Economy in Wuxi City. An Example of Climate Change Mitigation in China on the Local Level.
Michael Drewes (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Mannheim) and Luca Rebeggiani (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Bonn): Private vs. Public Financing of Sport Stadia in Germany – An Empirical Analysis.
Sascha Frohwerk (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam and GLO), Carsten Kruppe and Holger Wassermann: Evolution or Revolution: The Entry of New Company Successors in Germany
Kai Klotz and Alexander Spermann (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Freiburg University and GLO): Did the Refugee Crisis Cause the Rise of Right-wing Parties? Empirical Evidence from East Germany.
14.00-15.00. Plenary Speech joint with the monthly GLO Seminar Sriya Iyer (University of Cambridge and GLO): Religion and Mental Health Chair: Olga Popova (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, CERGE-EI & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
Massimiliano Tani (University of New South Wales & GLO) & Matloob Piracha (University of Kent & GLO): Migration and Education
Cinzia Rienzo ( University of Brighton & GLO): Performance of Economic Migrants
Cynthia A. Bansak (St. Lawrence University & GLO), Nicole Simpson (Colgate University & GLO) and Madeline Zavodny (University of North Florida & GLO): Immigrants and Their Effects on Labor Market Outcomes of Natives
The 37th EBES Conference takes place online on October 6-8 2021. GLO is a co-organizing partner, and FOM University of Applied Sciences is the local host supporting the event from Berlin.EBES, theEurasia Business and Economics Society, and FOM University of Applied Sciencesare strategic partners and institutional supporters of GLO.
Day ONE (October 6) saw opening speeches and lectures, intense parallel sessions, the conference keynote speech, and the EBES Journals session. EBES and GLO President Klaus F. Zimmermann spoke about The Future of Global Mobility. The Keynote Speech was provided by GLO Research Director David G. Blanchflower on The Economics of Walking About and Predicting Unemployment. (For the video of the Blanchflower keynote see LINK below.)
CONFERENCE PROGRAM WITH PARTICIPATION DETAILS: LINK
Some pictures from the event and an overview of the GLO-related contributions can be found below:
GLO supported program parts:
TIME STRUCTURE (All CET Berlin time)
Wednesday, October 6:
9.00 – 9.45. Welcome Speeches: Mehmet Bilgin (EBES & GLO), Manuela Zipperling (FOM & GLO), and Azita Berar Awad (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, & GLO) Opening Lecture: Klaus F. Zimmermann (UNU-MERIT, Free University Berlin & GLO) The Future of Global Mobility Chair: Mehmet Bilgin (Istanbul Medeniyet University, EBES & GLO)
Head of FOM Berlin, Manuela ZipperlingGLO Policy Director Azita Berar Awad
15.15-16.15. Keynote Speech David G. Blanchflower (Dartmouth College & GLO) The Economics of Walking About and Predicting Unemployment Chair: Matloob Piracha (University of Kent & GLO)
Matloob Piracha, David G. Blanchflower and Klaus F. Zimmermann (from the left)
GLO Research Director David G. Blanchflower
16.30-17.15. EBES Journals Session Chair: Klaus F. Zimmermann (EBES President & GLO) with Dorothea Schäfer (DIW Berlin, Jönköping University & GLO), Editor-in-Chief of Eurasian Economic Review, and Marco Vivarelli (Catholic University of Milano & GLO), Editor-in-Chief of the Eurasian Business Review.
Thursday, October 7:
9.00-11.00. FOM-GLO Session Chair: Alexander Spermann (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Freiburg University and GLO)
Monika Wohlmann (FOM University of Applied Science): The European Central Bank’s Strategy Review and the Management of Inflation Expectations
Sascha Frohwerk (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam and GLO): Retail Location Choice Models. A Comparison of Gravitation and Logit Model
Andreas Oberheitmann (Tsinghua University, FOM and GLO): Development of a Low Carbon Economy in Wuxi City. An Example of Climate Change Mitigation in China on the Local Level.
Michael Drewes (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Mannheim) and Luca Rebeggiani (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Bonn): Private vs. Public Financing of Sport Stadia in Germany – An Empirical Analysis.
Sascha Frohwerk (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam and GLO), Carsten Kruppe and Holger Wassermann: Evolution or Revolution: The Entry of New Company Successors in Germany
Kai Klotz and Alexander Spermann (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Freiburg University and GLO): Did the Refugee Crisis Cause the Rise of Right-wing Parties? Empirical Evidence from East Germany.
14.00-15.00. Plenary Speech joint with the monthly GLO Seminar Sriya Iyer (University of Cambridge and GLO): Religion and Mental Health Chair: Olga Popova (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, CERGE-EI & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
15.15 – 17.15. GLO Session Migration I Chair: Cynthia Bansak (St. Lawrence University & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
Sonia Plaza (World Bank & GLO): Measuring Migration
Massimiliano Tani (University of New South Wales & GLO) & Matloob Piracha (University of Kent & GLO): Migration and Education
Cinzia Rienzo ( University of Brighton & GLO): Performance of Economic Migrants
Cynthia A. Bansak (St. Lawrence University & GLO), Nicole Simpson (Colgate University & GLO) and Madeline Zavodny (University of North Florida & GLO): Immigrants and Their Effects on Labor Market Outcomes of Natives
Chunbei Wang (University of Oklahoma & GLO) & Magnus Lofstrom (Public Policy Institute of California & GLO): Immigrant Entrepreneurs
Friday, October 8:
14.15 – 16.15. GLO SessionFamily & Household Economics Chair: Victoria Vernon (SUNY Empire State College & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
Effrosyni Adamopoulou (University of Mannheim & GLO): Infidelity
Juan Carlos Campaña (Antonio de Nebrija University), José Ignacio Giménez-Nadal (University of Zaragoza) & José Alberto Molina (University of Zaragoza & GLO): Time-Use Surveys
Benjamin Scharadin (Colby College): Household Food Expenditures and Diet Quality
Daniel Fernandez-Kranz (IE Business School, Madrid) & Jennifer Roff (Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY): Child Custody Laws and Household Outcomes
Irene Mosca (Maynooth University & GLO) and Robert E. Wright (University of Glasgow & GLO): Economics of Marriage Bars
16.30 – 18.30. GLO Session Migration II Chair: Marina Murat (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
Jakub Lonsky (University of Liverpool & GLO) & Osea Giuntella (University of Pittsburgh & GLO): Migrant Health and Wellbeing
Kusum Mundra (Rutgers University & GLO): The Political Economy of Citizenship
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes (University of California & GLO), Anna Marie Kietzerow (Western Michigan University) & Susan Pozo (Western Michigan University): Naturalization, Citizenship, and Identity Documents
Stefanija Veljanoska (University of Rennes) & Frederic Docquier (LISER & GLO): Brain Drain or Gain
Amelie Constant (Princeton University & GLO): Time-Space Dynamics of Return and Circular Migration
Michele Tuccio (Université Paris-Dauphine & GLO) & Jackline Wahba (University of Southampton & GLO): Social Remittances
A new GLO Discussion Paper suggests that introducing public subsidies aimed at favoring R&D disclosure represents a win-win result for firms and society.
Author Abstract: This research contributes to the theory of cost-reducing R&D investments by offering a tractable three-stage non-cooperative Cournot duopoly game in which R&D-investing firms choose whether to disclose R&D-related information to the rival. Though in a noncooperative context firms have no incentive to unilaterally disclose information on their costreducing R&D activity to prevent the rival from freely appropriate it, this work shows that there is room for the government to design an optimal policy aimed at incentivising unilaterally each owner towards R&D disclosure. Under this welfare improving policy, sharing R&D-related information becomes a Pareto efficient Nash equilibrium strategy of selfish firms. These findings suggest that introducing public subsidies aimed at favouring R&D disclosure represents a win-win result, eliminating the so far established – and unpleasant for both firms and society – non-disclosing outcome.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: We investigate the causal impact of offering telehealth services to female microfinance borrowers on their health and bargaining power in the household. Using a balanced panel of 1218 female borrowers, we observe a positive impact of offering telehealth services on self-reported physical and mental health of treated relative to control women. Treated women seek healthcare more proactively; they are more likely to consult a doctor and they do so sooner, as compared to control women. In addition, treated women report greater inclusion in household decision-making. We also find positive spillover effects of offering telehealth services within the household, where we observe a greater likelihood of the spouse and children (of treated women) to seek health care.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
The 37th EBES Conference will take place online on October 6-8 2021. GLO is a co-organizing partner, and FOM University of Applied Sciences is the local host supporting the event from Berlin.EBES, theEurasia Business and Economics Society, and FOM University of Applied Sciencesboth are strategic partners and institutional supporters of GLO. GLO President Klaus F. Zimmermann is also President of EBES.FOM and GLO contribute own sessions as listed below.
CONFERENCE PROGRAM WITH PARTICIPATION DETAILS: LINK
An overview of the GLO-related contributions can be found below:
GLO supported program parts:
TIME STRUCTURE (All CET Berlin time)
Wednesday, October 6:
9.00 – 9.45. Welcome Speeches: Mehmet Bilgin (EBES & GLO), Manuela Zipperling (FOM & GLO), and Azita Berar Awad (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, & GLO) Opening Lecture: Klaus F. Zimmermann (UNU-MERIT, Free University Berlin & GLO) The Future of Global Mobility Chair: Mehmet Bilgin (Istanbul Medeniyet University, EBES & GLO)
15.15-16.15. Keynote Speech David G. Blanchflower (Dartmouth College & GLO) The Economics of Walking About and Predicting Unemployment Chair: Matloob Piracha (University of Kent & GLO)
16.30-17.15. EBES Journals Session Chair: Klaus F. Zimmermann (EBES President & GLO) with Dorothea Schäfer (DIW Berlin, Jönköping University & GLO), Editor-in-Chief of Eurasian Economic Review, and Marco Vivarelli (Catholic University of Milano & GLO), Editor-in-Chief of the Eurasian Business Review.
Thursday, October 7:
9.00-11.00. FOM-GLO Session Chair: Alexander Spermann (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Freiburg University and GLO)
Monika Wohlmann (FOM University of Applied Science): The European Central Bank’s Strategy Review and the Management of Inflation Expectations
Sascha Frohwerk (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam and GLO): Retail Location Choice Models. A Comparison of Gravitation and Logit Model
Andreas Oberheitmann (Tsinghua University, FOM and GLO): Development of a Low Carbon Economy in Wuxi City. An Example of Climate Change Mitigation in China on the Local Level.
Michael Drewes (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Mannheim) and Luca Rebeggiani (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Bonn): Private vs. Public Financing of Sport Stadia in Germany – An Empirical Analysis.
Sascha Frohwerk (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam and GLO), Carsten Kruppe and Holger Wassermann: Evolution or Revolution: The Entry of New Company Successors in Germany
Kai Klotz and Alexander Spermann (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Freiburg University and GLO): Did the Refugee Crisis Cause the Rise of Right-wing Parties? Empirical Evidence from East Germany.
14.00-15.00. Plenary Speech joint with the monthly GLO Seminar Sriya Iyer (University of Cambridge and GLO): Religion and Mental Health Chair: Olga Popova (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, CERGE-EI & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
15.15 – 17.15. GLO Session Migration I Chair: Cynthia Bansak (St. Lawrence University & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
Sonia Plaza (World Bank & GLO): Measuring Migration
Massimiliano Tani (University of New South Wales & GLO) & Matloob Piracha (University of Kent & GLO): Migration and Education
Cinzia Rienzo ( University of Brighton & GLO): Performance of Economic Migrants
Cynthia A. Bansak (St. Lawrence University & GLO), Nicole Simpson (Colgate University & GLO) and Madeline Zavodny (University of North Florida & GLO): Immigrants and Their Effects on Labor Market Outcomes of Natives
Chunbei Wang (University of Oklahoma & GLO) & Magnus Lofstrom (Public Policy Institute of California & GLO): Immigrant Entrepreneurs
Friday, October 8:
14.15 – 16.15. GLO SessionFamily & Household Economics Chair: Victoria Vernon (SUNY Empire State College & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
Effrosyni Adamopoulou (University of Mannheim & GLO): Infidelity
Juan Carlos Campaña (Antonio de Nebrija University), José Ignacio Giménez-Nadal (University of Zaragoza) & José Alberto Molina (University of Zaragoza & GLO): Time-Use Surveys
Benjamin Scharadin (Colby College): Household Food Expenditures and Diet Quality
Daniel Fernandez-Kranz (IE Business School, Madrid) & Jennifer Roff (Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY): Child Custody Laws and Household Outcomes
Irene Mosca (Maynooth University & GLO) and Robert E. Wright (University of Glasgow & GLO): Economics of Marriage Bars
16.30 – 18.30. GLO Session Migration II Chair: Marina Murat (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
Jakub Lonsky (University of Liverpool & GLO) & Osea Giuntella (University of Pittsburgh & GLO): Migrant Health and Wellbeing
Kusum Mundra (Rutgers University & GLO): The Political Economy of Citizenship
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes (University of California & GLO), Anna Marie Kietzerow (Western Michigan University) & Susan Pozo (Western Michigan University): Naturalization, Citizenship, and Identity Documents
Stefanija Veljanoska (University of Rennes) & Frederic Docquier (LISER & GLO): Brain Drain or Gain
Amelie Constant (Princeton University & GLO): Time-Space Dynamics of Return and Circular Migration
Michele Tuccio (Université Paris-Dauphine & GLO) & Jackline Wahba (University of Southampton & GLO): Social Remittances
A new GLO Discussion Paper finds only a very small or insignificant impact of changes in the real minimum wage on unemployment entries and exits in Greece.
Author Abstract: During the last decade, unemployment in Greece climbed up to 28%, almost quadrupling due to the economic crisis that hit Greece. In the present paper, we examine the determinants of the unemployment dynamics and the impact of the minimum wage on the probability of making a transition into and out of unemployment. We use micro-level data from the Greek Labour Force Survey for the period 2004-2019 and control for several demographic factors, macro-economic conditions, regional differences and changes in statutory minimum wage. The results suggest that individual-level characteristics play an important role in making a transition into or out of unemployment. Changes in the real minimum wage are estimated to have either a statistically insignificant or a very small impact on unemployment entries and exits. Further, the impact of economy’s growth rate follows the theoretical predictions as higher growth rates increase unemployment outflows and decrease inflows, while the regional differences are also important. Our findings persist even when we split the sample in three periods (pre-crisis, crisis, recovery). The results have important policy implications. Given that the disemployment effect of the minimum wage seems to be very limited in the Greek labour market, while the socioeconomic characteristics and regional characteristics play an important role, improving the skills of individuals through the educational system and reskilling or up-skilling programs, while targeting specific regions, may facilitate labour market mobility.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper studies determinants of self-rated physical and mental health of sexual minorities. Among other factors, increased aggregate unemployment deteriorates physical and mental wellbeing.
Author Abstract: Utilizing two panel datasets covering the periods 2013-2014 and 2018-2019, the study examines whether social rejection, family acceptance, and economic conditions bear an association with self-rated physical and mental health of sexual minorities. Social rejection bears a negative association with physical and mental health. Family acceptance shares a positive association with physical and mental health. Periods characterized by worse economic conditions (2013-2014 versus 2018-2019) correlate with a decline in sexual minorities’ physical and mental health. It is found that women, trans people, people without higher education degrees, unemployed people, and relatively poor people, experience worse physical and mental health than the corresponding reference categories. The study indicates that sexual minorities who experienced societal rejections, such as unfair treatment in educational, workplace environments, and/or services (public/health) prompted deteriorated physical and mental health. Sexual minorities who experienced acceptance from their families over their sexual orientation status, experienced better physical and mental health. Moreover, during periods of increased aggregate unemployment, the physical and mental health status of sexual minorities was deteriorated. Antidiscrimination policies help reduce homophobic incidents and positively impact sexual/gender identity minorities’ progression, self-esteem, income, and well-being. Public health services should ensure that policies are inclusive of the physical and mental health needs of sexual/gender identity minority groups. Addressing financial hardships for minority population groups should form part of the policymakers’ agenda. This is among the first international studies to examine whether, during a period of economic recession, sexual minorities experience deteriorated physical and mental health.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
On the invitation of ARGEIAD, Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University, Canada, Klaus F. Zimmermann, President of the Global Labor Organization (GLO) and UNU-MERIT, Maastricht, spoke on September 29, 2021 in a public online lecture on:
Global Mobility after the Pandemic
The meeting was chaired by Dr. Ather Akbari, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at the Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University, and head of ARGEIAD. More details.ARGEIAD, the Atlantic Research Group on Economics of Immigration, Aging and Diversity, focuses on the economic significance of immigration, diversity and aging. The center provides a platform to researchers, policymakers, policy practitioners and business organizations to exchange ideas and conduct research on these issues in a regional, national and international context.
Klaus F. Zimmermann
Ather Akbari
PROGRAM
Ather Akbari
Malcom Butler
Harjeet Singh Bhabra
Ian Munro
Discussant Tony Fang, Stephen Jarislowsky Chair in Cultural and Economic Transformation, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Abstract: “Global Mobility after the Pandemic“ Covid-19 has challenged the way humanity is organizing global welfare through cooperation and the division of work. Key causes of the spread of the virus have been the conditions of human mobility and exchange. The ultimate solution had been to restrict such mobility. Among the response mechanisms were home-work and internet collaborations. What are the long term consequences after the end of the pandemic? Will this end globalization? Or cause a faster transition into the future of work? And will the pandemic ever come fully to an end? The lecture will deal with those questions. It will work out the importance of migration and mobility for the creation of human welfare and development through the law of the division of work. It will review the experiences with the “Spanish Flu”, which early in the 20th century contributed to the end of the largely globalized world existing at the time before World War I. Will history repeat? It will then study the experiences we have so far with the mobility consequences of the pandemic and which innovations are under way dealing with it. The conclusions will speculate about the consequences for the future of migration.
SelectedReferences:
Bista, Krishna, Allen, Ryan M. & Chan, Roy Y. , Eds., 2021, Impacts of COVID-19 on International Students and the Future of Student Mobility. International Perspectives and Experiences, September 29, 2021. Forthcoming by Routledge.
Newland, Kathleen. 2020. Will International Migration Governance Survive the COVID-19 Pandemic? Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.
Gokhan Karabulut, Klaus F. Zimmermann, Mehmet Huseyin Bilgin and Asli Cansin Doker (2021), “Democracy and COVID-19 Outcomes”, Economics Letters (EL-Prepublication, EL-Online Appendix) Volume 203, June 2021, 109840 Open Access; free PDF. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2021.109840
ADB, OECD & ILO (2021); Labor Migration in Asia. Impacts of the COVID-19 Crisis and the post-pandemic future.
Victoria Vernon and Klaus F. Zimmermann (2021), “Walls and Fences: A Journey Through History and Economics”, in: Kourtit, K., Newbold, B., Nijkamp, P. and Partridge, M., The Economic Geography of Cross-Border Migration, Springer, Heidelberg et al., pp. 33-54; Pre-publication version.Published.
Zimmermann, Klaus F., Refugee and Migrant Labor Market Integration: Europe in Need of a New Policy Agenda. Presented at the EUI Conference on the Integration of Migrants and Refugees, 29-30 September 2016 in Florence. Published in: Bauböck, R. and Tripkovic, M., The Integration of Migrants and Refugees. An EUI Forum on Migration, Citizenship and Demography, European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence 2017, pp. 88 – 100. Published Version of article. Published full book.
On the invitation of ARGEIAD, Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University, Canada, Klaus F. Zimmermann, President of the Global Labor Organization (GLO) and UNU-MERIT, Maastricht, will speak on September 29, 2021 in a public online lecture on Global Mobility after the Pandemic. The meeting will be chaired by Dr. Ather Akbari, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at the Sobey School of Business, Saint Mary’s University, and head of ARGEIAD. More details.
ARGEIAD, the Atlantic Research Group on Economics of Immigration, Aging and Diversity, focuses on the economic significance of immigration, diversity and aging. The center provides a platform to researchers, policymakers, policy practitioners and business organizations to exchange ideas and conduct research on these issues in a regional, national and international context.
Ather Akbari
Klaus F. Zimmermann
Abstract: “Global Mobility after the Pandemic“ Covid-19 has challenged the way humanity is organizing global welfare through cooperation and the division of work. Key causes of the spread of the virus have been the conditions of human mobility and exchange. The ultimate solution had been to restrict such mobility. Among the response mechanisms were home-work and internet collaborations. What are the long term consequences after the end of the pandemic? Will this end globalization? Or cause a faster transition into the future of work? And will the pandemic ever come fully to an end? The lecture will deal with those questions. It will work out the importance of migration and mobility for the creation of human welfare and development through the law of the division of work. It will review the experiences with the “Spanish Flu”, which early in the 20th century contributed to the end of the largely globalized world existing at the time before World War I. Will history repeat? It will then study the experiences we have so far with the mobility consequences of the pandemic and which innovations are under way dealing with it. The conclusions will speculate about the consequences for the future of migration.
SelectedReferences:
Bista, Krishna, Allen, Ryan M. & Chan, Roy Y. , Eds., 2021, Impacts of COVID-19 on International Students and the Future of Student Mobility. International Perspectives and Experiences, September 29, 2021. Forthcoming by Routledge.
Newland, Kathleen. 2020. Will International Migration Governance Survive the COVID-19 Pandemic? Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.
Gokhan Karabulut, Klaus F. Zimmermann, Mehmet Huseyin Bilgin and Asli Cansin Doker (2021), “Democracy and COVID-19 Outcomes”, Economics Letters (EL-Prepublication, EL-Online Appendix) Volume 203, June 2021, 109840 Open Access; free PDF. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2021.109840
ADB, OECD & ILO (2021); Labor Migration in Asia. Impacts of the COVID-19 Crisis and the post-pandemic future.
Victoria Vernon and Klaus F. Zimmermann (2021), “Walls and Fences: A Journey Through History and Economics”, in: Kourtit, K., Newbold, B., Nijkamp, P. and Partridge, M., The Economic Geography of Cross-Border Migration, Springer, Heidelberg et al., pp. 33-54; Pre-publication version.Published.
Zimmermann, Klaus F., Refugee and Migrant Labor Market Integration: Europe in Need of a New Policy Agenda. Presented at the EUI Conference on the Integration of Migrants and Refugees, 29-30 September 2016 in Florence. Published in: Bauböck, R. and Tripkovic, M., The Integration of Migrants and Refugees. An EUI Forum on Migration, Citizenship and Demography, European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence 2017, pp. 88 – 100. Published Version of article. Published full book.
A new GLO Discussion Paper studies the role of formal institutions of contract enforcement in facilitating investments in small and medium firms in India.
Author Abstract: We study the role of formal institutions of contract enforcement in facilitating investments in small and medium firms(MSME). In a framework where established entrepreneurs can enforce contracts informally using their network ties and hierarchical advantage, we argue that an efficient formal judiciary helps entrepreneurs without any ties to informal business networks, disproportionately more. We test our theoretical prediction using a novel administrative panel-data from Indian courts and the nationally representative MSME survey data. Empirically, we treat entrepreneurs from disadvantaged castes (SC-ST) as those without traditional business-network ties. We find that improvement in court quality has a disproportionately larger impact on the investment decisions of SC-ST entrepreneurs. On average, if the time taken for a court to clear all existing cases reduces by 1 year, the initial gap in the probability of investing, between SC-ST and other entrepreneurs, gets reduced by 0.6-0.7 percentage points.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: The varieties-of-capitalism (VoC) approach distinguishes liberal market economies (LMEs) such as the USA and coordinated market economies (CMEs) such as Germany based on institutional differences in terms of corporate governance, industrial relations, company relations as well as education and training. According to the VoC approach, firms differ in the ways in which they combine market and non-market mechanisms to coordinate their activities. Firms in LMEs are considered to rely more on market or exit mechanisms than firms in CMEs, which more often complement market with non-market or voice mechanisms. This chapter summarizes what has been learned from the VoC approach on the linkages between the institutional environment and labor-management relations. Various important lessons can be drawn. Employment protection legislation is a productive element within the institutional setup of CMEs. LMEs tend to induce strong overall wage dispersion, whereas in some CMEs such as Germany the labor market performance varies markedly by skill type and gender. The recent literature also indicates that the institutional setup is more complex than the VoC approach suggests, calling for revisions to the approach. In particular, some countries are hybrid economies that combine elements of both types of capitalism. The CME-LME dichotomy does not appreciate the true variety of country-specific skill systems. Finally, multinational enterprises overcome institutional boundaries of different types of capitalism in ways that were not included in the original VoC approach.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper studies the history and effects of marriage bars,the requirement that women working in certain jobs must leave that job when they marry.
Author Abstract: A Marriage Bar is the requirement that women working in certain jobs must leave that job when they marry. In the twentieth century, Marriage Bars were not unusual internationally. In the late 1800s to early 1900s, legislative provisions that required women to resign at marriage were introduced in several countries around the world, including Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK. Spill-overs to jobs not strictly covered by the Marriage Bar were also common. This chapter critically reviews, from an economics perspective, the background, the history and the impacts of Marriage Bars. This chapter has four aims. The first is to summarise the arguments provided by government officials and employers to justify both the introduction and the retention of Marriage Bars. The second is to provide a cross-country comparison of Marriage Bars. The third is to investigate the potential impacts of the Marriage Bar on women’s behavior with respect to employment, marriage and education. The fourth is to highlight potential avenues for future research. Although Marriage Bars do not exist anymore, they are still a serious topic of current debate. Much more can be learned about important topics, such as discrimination, from carrying out research focused on Marriage Bars.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new paper published ONLINE FIRST with free readlink in the Journal of Population Economics finds that severe water contamination in the US modestly increased the rate of low birth weight, but had little effect on the length of gestation or rate of prematurity.
Published ONLINE FIRST 2021: Journal of Population Economics Free READLINK: https://rdcu.be/cytgm
Author Abstract: In 2014, the city of Flint, MI, in the USA changed its public water source, resulting in severe water contamination and a public health crisis. Using the Flint water crisis as a natural experiment, we estimate the effect of in utero exposure to polluted water on health at birth. Matching vital statistics birth records with various sources of data, we use the synthetic control method to identify the causal impact of water pollution on key birth outcomes. Our results suggest that the crisis modestly increased the rate of low birth weight (LBW) by 1.8 percentage points (or 15.5%) but had little effect on the length of gestation or rate of prematurity. However, these effects are larger among children born to black mothers, as indicated by an increase in the rate of LBW by 2.5 percentage points (or 19%). Children born to white mothers exhibit, on average, a 30.1-g decrease in birth weight. We find little evidence that the male-to-female sex ratio declines in the overall population, suggesting that the in utero scarring effect of the Flint water crisis may dominate the channel of mortality selection. However, we observe a slight decline in the sex ratio among children born to black mothers. Finally, we find no notable change in the fertility rates of either black women or white women in Flint. These results are robust to a rich set of placebo and falsification tests.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: This paper investigates whether and how China’s adoption of Soviet-aided industrialization programs in the 1950s has affected its long-run innovation. Focusing on 156 major industrial projects aided by the Soviet Union, combined with an instrumental variable approach, I find that the adoption of these programs substantially discourages local firms to innovate in the long run. A causal mediation analysis of instrumental variable settings shows that the negative effect is entirely driven by local firms’ lower intensity of incentive pay. This evidence suggests disadvantages of Soviet-aided industrialization programs for long-run innovation due to firms adopting incentive-incompatible management technology.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Presentations in this series are based on the projects that GLO-VirtYS program scholars completed as part of the their program participation. See for the details VirtYs program and the cohort 2021.
September 30th 2021 Program on 1 pm London/UK time.
Sydney (10pm), Beijing (8pm), Istanbul (3pm), Berlin (2pm), London (1pm), Cape Town (2pm), Washington DC (8am), Santiago de Chile (9am)
Jie Chen, Jiangsu University and GLO Affiliate Does vocational education pay better, or worse, than academic education? (GLO VirtYS program advisor Professor Francesco Pastore)
Muchin Bazan Ruiz, Virginia Tech and GLO Affiliate Women in Engineering: The Role of Role Models (GLO VirtYS program advisor Professor Kompal Sinha
Chaired by GLO VirtYS Program Director Olena Nizalova.
FOR PAST AND FUTURE EVENTS SEE THE GLO WEBSITE. Featured Image: Employee-Training-unsplash
Jie Chen is a lecturer of economics at Jiangsu University. Her research interests are in experimental economics and educational economics. She received her PhD in economics from the University of New South Wales.
GLO VirtYS project: Does vocational education pay better, or worse, than academic education?
In this paper, we use the Chinese General Social Survey data to analyze the returns to upper secondary vocational education in China. To address possible endogeneity of vocational training due to omitted heterogeneity, we construct a novel instrumental variable using the proportion of tertiary education graduates relative to the entire population by year. Our main finding is that, although returns to vocational upper secondary education appear higher than returns to academic upper secondary education according to the Mincerian equation, the results from the instrumental variable method tell the opposite story: vocational upper secondary graduates face a wage penalty compared to academic upper secondary graduates. The wage penalty is confirmed by an alternative and more recent IV method – the Lewbel method (Lewbel, 2012). Our findings highlight the importance of properly accounting for endogeneity when estimating the returns to vocational education.
Muchin Bazan Ruiz is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Virginia Tech. She has an MSc in Economics at the University of Warwick and a BSc. in Economics from Universidad de Piura. She has worked in the Superintendence of Banks, Insurance Companies, and Private Pension Funds (Peru) and as a Consultant at the Intern-American Development Bank. Muchin is passionate about Development and her research interests are in Development Economics, Economics of Education, and Gender Studies. She investigates the effect of role models on students’ career choices and perceptions using randomized controlled trials and administrative data.
GLO VirtYS project: Women in Engineering: The Role of Role Models
Gender disparities in STEM field participation are a major cause of concern for policymakers around the world. Given the higher average level of earnings of STEM graduates, low enrollment rates of women in these fields contribute to gender-based inequalities in earnings and wealth. This paper studies the effects of exposure to role models on female preferences for STEM fields. We conduct a randomized control trial where female senior students currently enrolled in engineering programs at an elite private university in Peru give talks about their experiences at randomly selected high schools. We find that exposure to this treatment increases high ability female students’ preferences for engineering programs by 14 percentage points. The effect is only statistically significant for the subgroup of female students with baseline math scores in the top 25 percentile, and that reside close to the city where the role models’ university is located. We also find positive but smaller effects on “low ability” male students. In a context where females are discouraged from enrolling in STEM fields, our results have important policy implications.
A new GLO Discussion Paper reveals selection in characteristics, a strong role for soft factors like social ties and sociocultural integration, and a faint role for economic factors.
Author Abstract: Aspirations provide the underlying dynamics of the behavior of individuals whether they are realized or not. Knowledge about the characteristics and motives of those who aspire to leave the host country is key for both host and home countries to formulate appropriate and effective policies in order to keep their valued immigrants or citizens and foster their (re-)integration. Based on unique individual-level Gallup World Polls data, a random utility model, and a multinomial logit we model the aspirations or stated preferences of immigrants across 138 countries worldwide. Our analysis reveals selection in characteristics, a strong role for soft factors like social ties and sociocultural integration, and a faint role for economic factors. Changes in circumstances in the home and host countries are also important determinants of aspirations. Results differ by the host countries’ level of economic development.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new paper published ONLINE FIRST with free readlink in the Journal of Population Economics finds that financial hardship is associated with significantly more screen time, particularly passive screen time, and screen time at excessive levels.
by Jessica L. Arnup, Nicole Black & David W. Johnston
Published ONLINE FIRST 2021: Journal of Population Economics Free READLINK: https://rdcu.be/cyeE8
Author Abstract: This paper examines the impact of children’s migration on the well-being of left-behind parents using panel data on experienced utility measured by the Day Reconstruction Method. Exploiting exogenous variation in exposure to employment shocks at migration destinations for identification, we find that left-behind parents experience lower utility when their adult children migrate. This is partly due to increased working time and less time spent in social activities, and partly due to reduced utility within activity type. The latter effect is consistent with the finding of less physical care and psychological support from children who have migrated. These negative effects dominate the possible benefits of greater income associated with children’s migration.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new paper published ONLINE FIRST with free readlink in the Journal of Population Economics finds that abortions in Mexico City reduced substantially during the period of stay-at-home orders.
Published ONLINE FIRST 2021: Journal of Population Economics Free READLINK: https://rdcu.be/cyeBt
Author Abstract: We study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and of government mandated mitigation policies on the number of abortions performed by Mexico City’s public abortion program. We find that the COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders (SAHO) implemented in Mexico led to unintended consequences for women’s sexual and reproductive health. Using difference-in-differences and event study analyses, we show that SAHO and the pandemic led to a fall in abortions of around 25% and find no evidence that unsafe abortions increased. We find a decrease in the share of single and teenage women getting abortions, arguably due to fewer unwanted pregnancies from decreased sexual activity, and estimate that at most 9.8% of the total fall in abortions can be attributed to this. We complement our analysis using call data from a government helpline and show that the SAHO time period led to fewer abortion- and contraception-related calls but to an increase in pregnancy-related calls.
Featured image: Fusion-medical-animation-on-unsplash
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper shows for China that a 1-day decrease in the time taken to confirm the first case in a city publicly led to 9.4% and 12.7% reductions in COVID-19 prevalence and mortality over the subsequent six months.
Author Abstract: This paper examines the causal impact of diagnostic efficiency on the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Using an instrumental variable approach, we show that a 1-day decrease in the time taken to confirm the first case in a city publicly led to 9.4% and 12.7% reductions in COVID-19 prevalence and mortality over the subsequent six months, respectively. The impact was larger for cities that are farther from the COVID-19 epicenter, are exposed to less migration, have more responsive public health systems, and have higher-capacity utilization of health systems. Social distancing and a less burdened health system are likely underlying mechanisms.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new paper published ONLINE FIRST with free OPEN ACCESS in the Journal of Population Economics finds that elections indeed matter. It has implications for postal voting reforms or postponing of large-scale, in-person (electoral) events during viral outbreaks.
PublishedOPEN ACCESS ONLINE FIRST PDF 2021: Journal of Population Economics
Author Abstract: Elections define representative democracies but also produce spikes in physical mobility if voters need to travel to polling places. In this paper, we examine whether large-scale, in-person elections propagate the spread of COVID-19. We exploit a natural experiment from the Czech Republic, which biannually renews mandates in one-third of Senate constituencies that rotate according to the 1995 election law. We show that in the second and third weeks after the 2020 elections (held on October 9–10), new COVID-19 infections grew significantly faster in voting compared to non-voting constituencies. A temporarily related peak in hospital admissions and essentially no changes in test positivity rates suggest that the acceleration was not merely due to increased testing. The acceleration did not occur in the population above 65, consistently with strategic risk-avoidance by older voters. Our results have implications for postal voting reforms or postponing of large-scale, in-person (electoral) events during viral outbreaks.
Featured image: Fusion-medical-animation-on-unsplash
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: We examine the relationship between wealth and health through prominent growth indicators and cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is represented by nutritional status. In this study, the proxy variable for nutritional status is BMI since there is a strong relationship between cognitive ability and nutrition. We use the reduced form equation in the cubic specification of time preference rate to estimate this relationship. We assume that the time preference rate is one of the outputs of cognitive ability. The growth indicators utilized are GDP per capita, schooling, overall and manufacturing productivities, and savings. We estimate our models using the FE, GMM estimators, and long difference OLS and IV estimation through balanced panel data for 47 countries for the 1980-2009 period, which is a representative period of the neo-liberal and globalization economic policy implications. Furthermore, by using the 1980-2009 period, we may eliminate the ripple effects of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Although there is ample evidence that the association between GDP per capita, overall and manufacturing productivities, and BMI could be cubic, we take the results of the long-difference quadratic specification into consideration and conclude that the relationship between all prominent growth indicators and BMI is inverse U-shaped. In other words, cognitive ability has a significant potential to progress growth and economic development only in a healthy status.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper finds that high levels of statutory employment protection is negatively associated with robot adoption, but firms also use industrial robots as potential substitutes for workers to reduce employees’ bargaining power.
Author Abstract: This work discusses and empirically investigates the relationship between labor regulation and robotization. In particular, the empirical analysis focuses on the relationship between the discipline of workers’ dismissal and the adoption of indus- trial robots in nineteen Western countries over the 2006{2016 period. We find that high levels of statutory employment protection have been negatively associated with robot adoption, suggesting that labor-friendly national legislations, by increasing adjustment costs (such as firing costs), and thus making investment riskier, provide less favorable environments for firms to invest in industrial robots. We also find, however, that the correlation is positively mediated by the sectoral levels of capital intensity, a hint that firms do resort to industrial robots as potential substitutes for workers to reduce employees’ bargaining power and to limit their hold-up opportunities, which tend to be larger in sectors characterized by high levels of operating leverage.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Background paper to the keynote address of Danny Blanchflower to the EBES 37 & GLO Berlin conference. More information: LINK.
Danny Blanchflower
Author Abstract: Unemployment is notoriously difficult to predict. In previous studies, once country fixed effects are added to panel estimates, few variables predict changes in unemployment rates. Using panel data for 29 European countries – Austria; Belgium; Bulgaria; Croatia; Cyprus; Czechia; Denmark; Estonia; Finland; France; Germany; Greece; Hungary; Ireland; Italy; Latvia; Lithuania; Luxembourg; Malta; Netherlands; Poland; Portugal; Romania; Slovakia; Slovenia; Spain; Sweden; Turkey and the UK – over 439 months between January 1985 and July 2021 in an unbalanced country*month panel of just over 10000 observations, we predict changes in the unemployment rate 12 months in advance based on individuals’ fears of unemployment, their perceptions of the economic situation and their own household financial situation. Fear of unemployment predicts subsequent changes in unemployment 12 months later in the presence of country fixed effects and lagged unemployment. Individuals’ perceptions of the economic situation in the country and their own household finances also predict unemployment 12 months later. Business sentiment (industry fear of unemployment) is also predictive of unemployment 12 months later. The findings underscore the importance of the “economics of walking about”. The implication is that these social survey data are informative in predicting economic downturns and should be used more extensively in forecasting. We also generate a 29 country-level annual panel on life satisfaction from 1985-2020 from the World Database of Happiness and show that the consumer level fear of unemployment variable lowers wellbeing over and above the negative impact of the unemployment rate itself. Qualitative survey metrics were able to predict the Great Recession and the economic slowdown in Europe just prior to the COVID pandemic.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: Communism was a two-edged sword for the trustees of the former regime. Communist party members and their relatives enjoyed status and privileges, while secret police informants were often coerced to work clandestinely and gather compromising materials about friends, colleagues, and neighbors. We examine the long-term consequences of such connections to the communist regime for life satisfaction in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We also calculate a monetary equivalent of those effects and empirically test mechanisms. The findings underscore that past communist regime connections have a persistent but differential effect on life satisfaction.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper finds that the higher the level of perceived income inequality is, the lower is the individual’s perception of social standing.
Author Abstract: This paper analyzes how perceived income inequality is associated with subjective well-being. Using four waves of the “Social Inequality” module of the International Social Survey Programme, I show that the higher the level of perceived income inequality is, the lower the individual’s perception of her social standing, even if objective income inequality and preferences for the legitimate level of income inequality are controlled for. The results are robust to the measure of perceived inequality and the choice of the outcome variable. The analysis also provides evidence that the estimated association is weaker for individuals with higher income, higher education, and countries without postcommunist history. Overall, the results suggest that not only do objective inequality and perception of fairness have consequences regarding subjective well-being but also the perceived level of income inequality itself.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: Kassenboehmer and DeNew (2012) claim that there is no well-being age U-shape effect for Germany, when controlling for fixed effects and respondent experience and interviewer characteristics in the German Socio-Economic Panel, 1994-2006. We re-estimate with a longer run of years and restrict the age of respondents to those under seventy and find the well-being age U-shape effect is neither flat nor trivial.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper finds that workers with no written contract of employment, receiving hourly wages lower than the national hourly minimum wages, and experiencing insults and/or threats in their present job experience worse physical health and increased levels of depression.
Author Abstract: Τhe study examines whether adverse working conditions for immigrants in Greece bear an association with deteriorated physical health and increased levels of depression during 2018 and 2019. Findings indicate that workers with no written contract of employment, receiving hourly wages lower than the national hourly minimum wages, and experiencing insults and/or threats in their present job experience worse physical health and increased levels of depression. The study found that the inexistence of workplace contracts, underpayment, and verbal abuse in the workplace may coexist. An increased risk of underpayment and verbal abuse reveals itself when workers do not have a contract of employment and vice versa. Immigrant workers without a job contract might experience a high degree of workplace precariousness and exclusion from health benefits and insurance. Immigrant workers receiving a wage lower than the corresponding minimum potentially do not secure a living income, resulting in unmet needs and low investments in health. Workplace abuse might correspond with vulnerability related to humiliating treatment. These conditions can negatively impact workers’ physical health and foster depression. Policies should promote written employment contracts and ensure a mechanism for workers to register violations of fair practices.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Interested researchers are cordially invited to submit their abstracts or papers for presentation consideration. The 37th EBES Conference will take place ONLINE ONLY on October 6-8 2021. GLO is a co-organizing partner, and FOM University of Applied Sciences is the local host supporting the event from Berlin.
This is aGLO supported event. EBES, theEurasia Business and Economics Society, and FOM University of Applied Sciencesboth are strategic partners and institutional supporters of GLO. GLO President Klaus F. Zimmermann is also President of EBES.FOM and GLO contribute own sessions as listed below.
Authors are invited to submit their abstracts or papers no later than September 17, 2021.
9.00 – 9.45. Welcome Speeches: Mehmet Bilgin (EBES & GLO), Manuela Zipperling (FOM & GLO), and Azita Berar Awad (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, & GLO) Opening Lecture: Klaus F. Zimmermann (UNU-MERIT, Free University Berlin & GLO) The Future of Global Mobility Chair: Mehmet Bilgin (Istanbul Medeniyet University, EBES & GLO)
15.15-16.15. Keynote Speech David G. Blanchflower (Dartmouth College & GLO) The Economics of Walking About and Predicting Unemployment Chair: Matloob Piracha (University of Kent & GLO)
16.30-17.15. EBES Journals Session Chair: Klaus F. Zimmermann (EBES President & GLO) with Dorothea Schäfer (DIW Berlin, Jönköping University & GLO), Editor-in-Chief of Eurasian Economic Review, and Marco Vivarelli (Catholic University of Milano & GLO), Editor-in-Chief of the Eurasian Business Review.
Thursday, October 7:
9.00-11.00. FOM-GLO Session Chair: Alexander Spermann (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Freiburg University and GLO)
Monika Wohlmann (FOM University of Applied Science): The European Central Bank’s Strategy Review and the Management of Inflation Expectations
Sascha Frohwerk (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam and GLO): Retail Location Choice Models. A Comparison of Gravitation and Logit Model
Andreas Oberheitmann (Tsinghua University, FOM and GLO): Development of a Low Carbon Economy in Wuxi City. An Example of Climate Change Mitigation in China on the Local Level.
Michael Drewes (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Mannheim) and Luca Rebeggiani (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Bonn): Private vs. Public Financing of Sport Stadia in Germany – An Empirical Analysis.
Sascha Frohwerk (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Potsdam and GLO), Carsten Kruppe and Holger Wassermann: Evolution or Revolution: The Entry of New Company Successors in Germany
Kai Klotz and Alexander Spermann (FOM University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Freiburg University and GLO): Did the Refugee Crisis Cause the Rise of Right-wing Parties? Empirical Evidence from East Germany.
14.00-15.00. Plenary Speech joint with the monthly GLO Seminar Sriya Iyer (University of Cambridge and GLO): Religion and Mental Health Chair: Olga Popova (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, CERGE-EI & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
15.15 – 17.15. GLO Session Migration I Chair: Cynthia Bansak (St. Lawrence University & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
Sonia Plaza (World Bank & GLO): Measuring Migration
Massimiliano Tani (University of New South Wales & GLO) & Matloob Piracha (University of Kent & GLO): Migration and Education
Cinzia Rienzo ( University of Brighton & GLO): Performance of Economic Migrants
Cynthia A. Bansak (St. Lawrence University & GLO), Nicole Simpson (Colgate University & GLO) and Madeline Zavodny (University of North Florida & GLO): Immigrants and Their Effects on Labor Market Outcomes of Natives
Chunbei Wang (University of Oklahoma & GLO) & Magnus Lofstrom (Public Policy Institute of California & GLO): Immigrant Entrepreneurs
Friday, October 8:
14.15 – 16.15. GLO SessionFamily & Household Economics Chair: Victoria Vernon (SUNY Empire State College & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
Effrosyni Adamopoulou (University of Mannheim & GLO): Infidelity
Juan Carlos Campaña (Antonio de Nebrija University), José Ignacio Giménez-Nadal (University of Zaragoza) & José Alberto Molina (University of Zaragoza & GLO): Time-Use Surveys
Benjamin Scharadin (Colby College): Household Food Expenditures and Diet Quality
Daniel Fernandez-Kranz (IE Business School, Madrid) & Jennifer Roff (Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY): Child Custody Laws and Household Outcomes
Irene Mosca (Maynooth University & GLO) and Robert E. Wright (University of Glasgow & GLO): Economics of Marriage Bars
16.30 – 18.30. GLO Session Migration II Chair: Marina Murat (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia & GLO)
Note: The session relates to the Springer Nature Handbook project“Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics”supported by the GLO network.
Jakub Lonsky (University of Liverpool & GLO) & Osea Giuntella (University of Pittsburgh & GLO): Migrant Health and Wellbeing
Kusum Mundra (Rutgers University & GLO): The Political Economy of Citizenship
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes (University of California & GLO), Anna Marie Kietzerow (Western Michigan University) & Susan Pozo (Western Michigan University): Naturalization, Citizenship, and Identity Documents
Stefanija Veljanoska (University of Rennes) & Frederic Docquier (LISER & GLO): Brain Drain or Gain
Amelie Constant (Princeton University & GLO): Time-Space Dynamics of Return and Circular Migration
Michele Tuccio (Université Paris-Dauphine & GLO) & Jackline Wahba (University of Southampton & GLO): Social Remittances
A new GLO Discussion Paper finds substantial ethnic segregation across workplaces in the UK, but most of the ethnic wage gap exists between observationally equivalent co-workers.
Author Abstract: Using matched employer-employee data for Britain, we examine ethnic wage differentials among full-time employees. We find substantial ethnic segregation across workplaces: around three-fifths of workplaces in Britain employ no ethnic minority workers. However, this workplace segregation does not contribute to the aggregate wage gap between ethnic minorities and white employees. Instead, most of the ethnic wage gap exists between observationally equivalent co-workers. Lower pay satisfaction and higher levels of skill mismatch among ethnic minority workers are consistent with discrimination in wage-setting on the part of employers. The use of job evaluation schemes within the workplace is shown to be associated with a smaller ethnic wage gap.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
“In 1965, a family-reunification policy for admitting immigrants to the United States replaced a system that chose immigrants based on their national origin. With this change, a 40-year hiatus in Asian immigration ended. Today, over three-quarters of US immigrants originate from Asia and Latin America. Two issues that dominate discussions of US immigration policy are the progress of post-reform immigrants and their contributions to the US economy.
This book focuses on the earnings and human capital investment of Asian immigrants to the US after 1965. In addition, it provides a primer on studying immigrant economic assimilation, by explaining economists’ methodology to measure immigrant earnings growth and the challenges with this approach. The book also illustrates strategies to more fully use census data such as how to measure family income and how to use “panel data” that is embedded in the census.
The book is a historical study as well as an extremely timely work from a policy angle. The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act set the United States apart among economically developed countries due to the weight given to family unification. Based on analyses by economists—which suggest that the quality of immigrants to the US fell after the 1965 law—policymakers have called for fundamental changes in the US system to align it with the immigration systems of other countries. This book offers an alternative view point by proposing a richer model that incorporates investments in human capital by immigrants and their families. It challenges the conventional model in three ways: First, it views the decline in immigrants’ entry earnings after 1965 as due to investment in human capital, not to permanently lower “quality.” Second, it adds human capital investment and earnings growth after entry to the model. And finally, by taking investments by family members into account, it challenges the policy recommendation that immigrants should be selected for their occupational qualifications rather than family connections.”
Human Capital Investment. A History of Asian Immigrants and Their Family Ties
Authors: Duleep, H., Regets, M., Sanders, S., Wunnava, P.
“The authors attack forcefully an established myth in the US based immigration literature, namely that post-1965 immigrants were of low quality since they came at a time with a policy focus on family unification. They make us aware of the huge impact family investments have had among their studied Asian immigrants on high school attendance rates and other human capital improvements generating the most upwardly mobile among American workers. It seems that the migration history of that period has to be re-written.” (Klaus F. Zimmermann, President Global Labor Organization, Bonn University and UNU-MERIT, Maastricht)
Mark C. Regets, Seth Sanders, Phanindra V. Wunnava and Harriet Duleep
Harriet Duleep is Research Professor of Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. She is a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization. Her main areas of research include immigration, the socioeconomic determinants of mortality, discrimination and minority economic status, and women’s labor force behavior.
Mark Regets is a Senior Fellow at the National Foundation for American Policy; a Fellow at the Global Labor Organization; and a Research Fellow at IZA. He “retired” from the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and continues to write on immigration and science labor markets both as separate issues and where they intersect.
Seth G. Sanders is the Ronald G. Ehrenberg Chair in the Department of Economics at Cornell University. His research focuses on marginalized groups in the U.S. His work has appeared in a wide set of leading journals.
Phanindra V. Wunnava is the David K. Smith ’42 Chair in Applied Economics at Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, a Research Fellow at IZA, Bonn, Germany, and Fellow at Global Labor Organization. His research appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals.
GLO: What is wrong with the received wisdom of the economics literature on the earnings of immigrants?
Harriet Duleep: Economists make two conceptual errors in their study of immigrant earnings. They equate earnings with level of human capital and they assume that differences in entry earnings, adjusting for levels of education and experience, measure differences in immigrant quality.
A perspective that permeates our book is that the economic success of immigrants cannot be measured by their initial ability to market their skills. If entry earnings are correlated with any factor that enables or increases human capital investment then immigrant entry earnings measure neither human capital or unmeasured immigrant quality.
Human capital that is not immediately valued in the host-country’s labor market is useful for learning new skills. Immigrants who do not initially earn on par with similarly educated natives provide a flexible source of human capital that supports the ever-changing needs of the U.S. economy. Emphasizing the low entry earnings of the post-1965 immigrants minimizes the depth of their contributions to the U.S. economy.
Also distorted is the measurement of immigrant earnings growth. By using the fixed-cohort-effect method economists commit a statistical design error by assuming that earnings growth rates are constant across year-of-entry cohorts.
Seth Sanders: The received wisdom also ignores interactions among family members. For the groups analyzed in this book, the low adjusted earnings of immigrant men during their initial U.S. years are often partially, or even completely, offset by the earnings of immigrant women.
We also find a large negative effect of husband’s self-employment on wives’ labor force participation. This likely reflects the wife contributing unpaid labor to the family’s business. In fact, whether the husband is self-employed is more important to a woman’s decision to work than whether the husband has been recently unemployed and, for some groups, than having young children at home.
Phanindra Wunnava: The extended family is also ignored. Sibling admissions negatively affect initial earnings but positively affect earnings growth. This suggest that extended family, or being part of a group with high extended-family admissions, aids the human capital investment of individual immigrants. We also find a positive and highly statistically significant relationship between the propensity of individual immigrants to be self-employed and the percent of their cohort who gained admission as siblings. For Asian immigrant men, the effect of sibling admissions on the propensity to be self-employed exceeds the effect of any other variable in our analysis.
GLO: Why are human capital investments the clue?
Mark Regets: When immigrants have problems transferring skills between labor markets—whether because of credentials, language, work processes, or changing their career—they have both lower costs and higher returns to human capital investments. Lower initial wages mean lower opportunity costs. New host-country human capital, valuable in of itself, also helps make their prior skills usable in their new labor market. In addition, the skill of knowing how to learn often transfers more directly than labor market skills. Thus, human capital investment not only makes entry earnings a poor predictor of an immigrant’s labor market success, but creates an inverse relationship between entry earnings and earnings growth.
Harriet Duleep:The human capital investments of immigrants who initially have problems transferring skills impact the U.S. economy. In a recent GLO paper David Jaeger, Peter McHenry, and I took the Immigrant Human Capital Investment (IHCI) model described in this book and viewed it from an employer’s perspective. Immigrants’ willingness to engage in human capital investment makes them a particular asset to entrepreneurs needing a labor force to learn new skills. We find that college-educated immigrants, especially from less-developed countries, are associated with increased entrepreneurship at the state level, a result that persists when we focus on entrepreneurship among natives (rather than immigrants themselves). David Green, in his 1999 Journal of Labor Economics paper, finds that immigration may contribute to a more flexible labor force because immigrants are more occupationally mobile than natives even long after their arrival.
GLO: Why have you chosen Asian immigrants to the US as reference? Strong family connections and high educational ambitions may make them a special group.
Seth Sanders:In the mosaic that is U.S. immigration, Asian immigrants have been understudied. They are, however, a very important part of U.S. immigration: as a percent of U.S. legal immigration they surpass Hispanic immigration.
I would also like to stress that though the book’s title is “Human Capital Investment: A History of Asian Immigrants and Their Family Ties,” it is more broadly focused on comparing immigrants from economically developing countries versus economically developed countries. We compare the earnings profiles, human capital investment, and family-aided assimilation of Asian immigrant groups from developing countries with immigrants from Western Europe and Japan.
Harriet Duleep:Persons coming from economically developing countries face serious constraints in their career, living conditions, and hopes for their children. By migrating—even if it means starting an entirely new career—they provide a highly flexible workforce to the U.S. A workforce all the more valuable because of what they have learned prior to their migration.
In addition to skill transferability (the lower the skill transferability, the higher the propensity to invest in new human capital), the book explores additional themes that affect the propensity of immigrants to invest in new human capital. These themes likely hold for other groups from economically developing countries.
One is the importance of permanence to human capital investment. In contrast to West European immigrants, Asian immigrants from developing countries are highly permanent. The propensity to invest in new human capital and the propensity to stay in the U.S. are jointly determined. Why invest in new human capital if you don’t plan on staying?
We would expect a high level of permanence for immigrants from the developing nations of Africa and much of Latin America. Analysts who follow our methodological suggestions should find high earnings growth particularly among those who enter the U.S. with relatively high levels of schooling.
Education’s effect on human capital investment is ambiguous in most human capital investment models increasing both the productivity and opportunity cost of human capital investment. In the IHCI model, explored in our book, education that does not fully transfer to the labor market (and thus does not raise the opportunity cost of human capital investment) is useful for learning new skills. The incentive to invest in new human capital increases for those with low skill transferability and with relatively high levels of education. We would expect to find high earnings growth among not only the Asian immigrants from developing countries but from similar immigrants from Africa and much of Latin America.
GLO: What brought you together as a team?
Harriet Duleep: Seth, Mark, and I were part of the research office of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. One of our goals was to follow the economic status of various ethnic and racial groups over time. Examining the earnings growth of immigrant men, Mark and I found high earning growth, contradicting Borjas’ Journal of Economic Literature article.
Mark, Seth, and I also worked on how to measure discrimination. Phani invited us to Middlebury College for a conference focused on discrimination, which led to the book New Approaches to Economic and Social Analyses of Discrimination (Link to). Steve Woodbury, who attended Phani’s conference, had read The Economic Status of Americans of Asian Descent, which Seth and I had written. Steve noted that very little work had been done on Asian immigrants. He urged us to pursue a book focused on Asian immigrants. With this, Human Capital Investment: A History of Asian Immigrants and Their Family Ties was born. It was an ongoing activity for the four of us for two decades.
Phanindra Wunnava:I had the good fortune to have known Mark in graduate school (we both had the same mentor: Solomon Polachek), and worked with Harriet in co-organizing a professional conference at my home institution focusing on family ties and immigration in 1993, which resulted in a well-received edited volume (Link to). Our coedited volume provided a logical springboard to our current book focusing on Asian immigrants and the role of family in augmenting their human capital investments to succeed in the U.S.
GLO: What are the policy conclusions from your work?
Mark Regets:Too much of the U.S. immigration debate talks about good immigrants and not-so-good immigrants. Most green cards are given to people with either an employer or a family sponsor. Our book shows that family-sponsored immigrants, even if they often start with lower earnings, do well economically in the United States. To find a niche in the U.S. labor market, they invest in human capital. Their earnings rapidly rise because of their new human capital, and because their new skills or certifications help them use more of their old skills.
Their families are also a factor. There is the positive selectivity of a relative being willing to sponsor—few immigrants want to sponsor someone who will be a burden on them. There is also the possibility of family members assisting immigrants in adapting to the United States. Family-based immigrants and refugees do not enjoy the immediate high-demand for their skills that employment-based immigrants do. But, they experience much higher earnings growth than employment-based immigrants. The highest earning growth rates are among those from countries with high rates of sibling admissions—one of the most criticized admission categories.
It is not only employer-sponsored immigrants who help the economy. Other immigrants add dynamism to the economy by their numerous strategies to find a niche for their skills in the labor market. Their much faster earnings growth eliminates social pathologies associated with low initial earnings, creating a more optimistic path for both them and their children.
Harriet Duleep:Concerns about a decline in immigrant quality emanate from methodological flaws in the measurement of immigrant earnings growth. The high earnings growth we find for immigrants beginning with low adjusted earnings is inconsistent with low labor market quality. The whole notion of a decline in immigrant quality when Asia and Latin America replaced Europe as the main source of immigrants should be excised from the policy discussion.
From a perspective of boosting human capital investment, policies to promote immigrant permanence should be encouraged. Temporary migration has an increasingly important role to play in a global economy, but policies that discourage long-term migration are short-sighted.
Policy makers should not view the U.S. post-1965 emphasis on family admissions solely from a humanitarian perspective. Their high human capital investment via educational investment, occupational change, and other paths has the important policy implication that the post-1965 immigrants may be better equipped than U.S. natives or immigrants with high skill transferability to dynamically respond to the changing skill needs of the U.S. economy.
Mark Regets: None of our work explicitly deals with finding an “optimal” mix of admissions programs, but I don’t see any policy reason that the number of family and employer sponsored immigrants need to be under a common total cap—if anything family and employer sponsored immigration create an increased demand for each other and complement each other in labor markets.
While I see value to both family and employer sponsorship, it might be worthwhile for the United States to once again allow unsponsored immigrants. Any point system we adopt in the future should be an addition to, not a replacement to the sponsorship system—creating a pathway for unsponsored immigrants.
GLO: Your support of immigration selection through family connections may undervalue the policy of selecting immigrants from successful foreign university graduates. What do you think?
Mark Regets: Though often presented as a dichotomy, family-based immigration complements employment-based immigration When NSF’s surveys ask foreign-born university grads about why they came to the United States, more than half list family as one of the reasons. There is a lot I would support to make it easier for the highest skilled migrants to come to the United States and easier for them to stay, but if we want the best, we need to be friendly to families. Even if we were able to cherry-pick immigrants without consideration for their families, each type of immigrant provides different types of economic benefits.
Phanindra Wunnava: My family is a perfect example of what Mark is talking about. My brother, Professor Subbarao Wunnava, is currently Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer engineering at Florida International University. Prior to coming to the U.S. he had a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from India with both teaching and industrial experience. He came to the U.S. via a visitor visa as a Post-Doctoral Fellow to North Dakota State University’s Physics Department, and later received his green card via an “Employment Visa.” I then came to the U.S. from India through a “Family Preference Visa” sponsored by my brother. One of the attractions of the U.S. to my brother was its family-friendly admissions policy.
Once here, my brother and sister-in-law supported me giving me a chance at the American Dream, which included among other things, allowing me to pursue a doctorate in economics. As documented in our book, the role of family cannot be overemphasized in the journey of immigrants to realize their full potential to be productive and contributing members of our society.
GLO: Harriet, how relates the book to your forthcoming article in the Journal of Population Economics?
The book shows how the assumption that earnings growth rates are constant across year-of-entry cohorts understates the earnings growth of specific groups that begin their U.S. trajectories with low initial earnings. The JOPE article illustrates this point for all immigrants.
The JOPE article also proves another important reason for the underestimates of immigrant earnings growth in studies following synthetic cohorts. This is how that revelation occurred.
For many years, Mark and I maintained that our results differed from those of Borjas because the fixed-cohort-effect method does not allow earnings growth to vary with entry earnings. But then, in recent years, editors rejecting our elusive and country-of-origin papers said that Borjas in his 2015 Journal of Human Capital paper did allow earnings growth to vary with entry earnings, and he still found low earnings growth for post-1965 immigrants.
The Society of Labor Economists was meeting in the Washington DC area and Xingfei Liu was presenting. Mark, Xingfei, and I met at the National Gallery of Art to discuss our most recent country-of-origin paper rejection. Mark and I were skeptical that Borjas (2015) actually let earnings growth vary with entry earnings. Xingfei disagreed. In the midst of Matisse, Monet, and Cezanne, he painstakingly went through the computer programming that underlies Borjas’ Journal of Human Capital article and showed Mark and me that Borjas had indeed let earnings growth vary with entry earnings.
The three of us then asked, what is going on??! Why did Mark and I in our elusive papers and Xingfei, Mark, and I in our Country of Origin papers find high earnings growth for immigrant men relative to natives, when Borjas found low earnings growth, using the same data!
In the silence, a calling from Sherlock Holmes occurred: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
We did not exclude zero earners or students in our synthetic cohort analyses whereas Borjas did. We had also found high earnings growth for immigrants in longitudinal data (see our papers in Demography) where we did exclude zero earners. What did our synthetic cohort analyses and the longitudinal analyses have in common?
In each case the same type of individuals were in both first- and second-period samples—in the longitudinal data because they were the same individuals and in the synthetic cohorts because zero earnings did not knock anyone out of the sample in either period. Excluding zero earners in a synthetic cohort analysis will exclude people from the first period who would be eligible for the sample in the second period and vice versa. If immigrants are differentially affected from the sample restrictions as natives, then estimates of immigrant earnings growth relative to natives may have little to do with the actual earnings growth of immigrants. High earnings growth for immigrants may be changed to low earnings growth simply because low wage-earning natives are more likely to leave the labor force with age. Our results overturn the accepted wisdom that post-1965 U.S. immigrants have low earnings growth. They have high earnings growth. Please see Part IV of the forthcoming JOPE paper.
************* With the authors spoke Klaus F. Zimmermann, GLO President.
A new GLO Discussion Paper reports that there is a systematic age gradient in the reporting error in BMIsuggesting potential bias in the use of such data and the need to collect objective measures.
Author Abstract: We designed an experiment to explore the extent of measurement error in body mass index (BMI), when based on self-reported body weight and height. We find that there is a systematic age gradient in the reporting error in BMI, while there is limited evidence of systematic associations with gender, education and income. This is reassuring evidence for the use of self-reported BMI in studies that use it as an outcome, for example, to analyse socioeconomic gradients in obesity. However, our results suggest a complex structure of non-classical measurement error in BMI, depending on both individuals’ and within-household peers’ true BMI. This may bias studies that use BMI based on self-reported data as a regressor. Common methods to mitigate reporting error in BMI using predictions from corrective equations do not fully eliminate reporting heterogeneity associated with individual and withinhousehold true BMI. Overall, the presence of non-classical error in BMI highlights the importance of collecting measured body weight and height data in large social science datasets.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper find that local politicians in India systematically misallocate resources based on party loyalty and successfully deliver votes to their national co-partisans.
Author Abstract: Local politicians can function as crucial intermediaries between voters and party bosses in a clientelistic network. We study their role by matching data on 300 million welfare payments in the Indian state of West Bengal to village-level election returns. Local politicians systematically misallocate resources based on party loyalty and successfully deliver votes to their national co-partisans. Politicians are compensated for successful mobilization through a performance bonus immediately after the national election. The (promise of) increased compensation from government funds induces opposition candidates to switch to the ruling party in strategically important local councils, bringing them under its control.
Laura V. Zimmermann has a joint appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and in theDepartment of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. She recently presented her research on gender bias and policy in India summarized in GLO Discussion Paper No. 888 at the Fourth IESR-GLO Conference. Video of presentation: LINK
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
All the presentation in this series are based on the projects that GLO-VirtYS program scholars completed as part of their program participation.
September 9th 2021 Program on 1 pm London/UK time.
Chaired by GLO VirtYS Program Director Olena Nizalova.
Jun Hyung Kim, Jinan University and GLO Affiliate Mental Health Consequences of Working from Home during the Pandemic (GLO VirtYS program advisor Professor Jan van Ours) Watch the video of the event: Kim.
Femke Cnossen, University of Groningen and GLO Affiliate Learning the Right Skill: Revealed Local Labour Demand for Underlying Skills in STEM and Non-STEM Graduates (GLO VirtYS program advisors Dr Matloob Piracha and Dr Guy Tchuente)
Author Abstract:This paper is the first to investigate the role of firm-level upstreamness (i.e. the number of steps before the production of a firm meets final demand) in explaining wage differences according to workers’ origin. Using unique linked employer-employee data relative to the Belgian manufacturing industry for the period 2002-2010, our estimates show that firms that are further up in the value chain pay significantly higher wages. However, the wage premium associated with upstreamness is also found to vary substantially depending on the origin of the workers. Unconditional quantile estimates suggest that those who benefit the most from being employed in more upstream firms are high-wage workers born in developed countries. In contrast, workers born in developing countries, irrespective of their earnings, appear to be unfairly rewarded. Quantile decompositions further show that, while differences in average values of upstreamness according to workers’ origin play a limited role, differences in wage premia associated with upstreamness account for a substantial part of the wage gap between workers born in developed and developing countries, especially at the top of the earnings distribution. These results are shown to be robust to a number of sensitivity tests, including broader or narrower definitions of workers’ wages and different firm environments in terms of technological and knowledge intensity.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new GLO Discussion Paper shows that studies cited by psychologists claiming there are no U-shapes are in error. The effects of the mid-life dip are comparable to major life events such as losing a spouse or becoming unemployed.
Author Abstract: A number of studies – including our own – find a mid-life dip in well-being. Yet several papers in the psychology literature claim that the evidence of a U-shape is “overblown” and if there is such a thing that any such decline is “trivial”. Others have claimed that the evidence of a U-shape “is not as robust and generalizable as is often assumed,” or simply “wrong.” We identify 424 studies, mostly published in peer reviewed journals that find U-shapes that these researchers apparently were unaware of. We use data for Europe from the Eurobarometer Surveys (EB), 1980-2019; the Gallup World Poll (GWP), 2005-2019 and the UK’s Annual Population Survey, 2016-2019 and the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey of August 2021, to examine U-shapes in age in well-being. We find remarkably strong and consistent evidence across countries of statistically significant and non-trivial U-shapes in age with and without socio-economic controls. We show that studies cited by psychologists claiming there are no U-shapes are in error; we reexamine their data and find differently. The effects of the mid-life dip we find are comparable to major life events such as losing a spouse or becoming unemployed. This decline is comparable to half of the unprecedented fall in well-being observed in the UK in 2020 and 2021, during the Covid19 pandemic and lockdown, which is hardly “inconsequential” as claimed.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Global Labor Organization (GLO) invites interested young scholars to apply for participation in the 2021-22GLO Virtual Young Scholars Program (GLO VirtYS). This is the third cohort of the successful GLO venture to support career developments of young researchers. It also provides a unique opportunity to interact with the large and very active GLO global network.
Application deadlineEXTENDED: September 24, 2021, 5 pm GM.
A new GLO Discussion Paper finds that self-reported physical and mental health decreased in 2013 and in 2019 compared to 2009indicating the need for more inclusive health strategies.
Author Abstract: In Greece, given the precarious nature of the sex work industry, sex workers health and wellbeing is of concern. However, relevant research remains limited. This study examined whether sex workers’ self-reported physical and mental health deteriorated across time points during the economic recession in Athens, Greece. The study focused on 13 areas where off-street and street-based sex work occured. Cross-sectional data was collected from the same areas in 2009 (i.e. before the economic recession began) and in 2013 and 2019 (i.e. at time points during the recession). Self-reported physical and mental health decreased in 2013 and in 2019 compared to 2009. A positive association was found between the country’s gross domestic product and sex workers’ self-reported physical and mental health. The opposite was found for annual aggregate unemployment. The determinants of better self-reported physical and mental health were sex workers’ economic condition, Greek nationality, off-street sex work, and registered sex work status. The opposite was found for more years’ involvement in sex work and drug consumption. Findings indicate the need for more inclusive health strategies, especially during periods of economic downturn when sex workers’ physical/mental health is likely to decline. This is the first study to investigate the association between economic recession and sex workers’ self-reported physical and mental health.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Presentations in this series are based on the projects that GLO-VirtYS program scholars completed as part of the their program participation. See for the details VirtYs program and the cohort 2021.
September 16th 2021 Program on 1 pm London/UK time.
Odmaa Narantungalag, Massey University and GLO Affiliate The Local Impacts of Natural Resource Extraction: Evidence from Mongolia (GLO VirtYS program advisor Professor Kompal Sinha)
Soumya Pal, Centre for Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and GLO Affiliate Weather Shock, Agricultural Productivity, and Infant Health: A Tale of Environmental Justice (GLO VirtYS program advisor Professor Almas Heshmati) Video
Chaired by GLO VirtYS Program Director Olena Nizalova.
Featured Image: Employee-Training-unsplash
Odmaa Narantungalag is a Ph.D. student in economics at Massey University in New Zealand. Her research interests are in development economics, natural resource economics, and health economics. Odmaa holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from American University in Bulgaria and a Master of Public Administration from Tsinghua University, China. Prior to starting her doctoral studies, Odmaa worked as a national consultant at the Ministry of Economic Development and Ministry of Finance in Mongolia for various projects implemented by the World Bank and United Nations Development Programme.
GLO VirtYS project: The Local Impacts of Natural Resource Extraction: Evidence from Mongolia
This paper investigates the local economic impacts of a large-scale copper-gold mine in Mongolia. Employing household data from 2008 to 2016, I find positive economic effects of the mine. A ten percent increase in mining activities resulted in 2.2 and 2.3 percent increases in income and food consumption, respectively. Mining activities enabled households to increase their medical expenditures, while sickness did not increase significantly. In contrast, education expenditures dropped while educational attainments improved in mining areas. Both expenditure patterns indicate that large-scale extractive industries can positively benefit residents, and corporate social responsibility activities further enhance the mining sector’s traditional benefits.
Soumya Pal is PhD Candidate at the Centre for Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. His research interests are broadly in the domain of Climate Change, Regulations, and Environmental Justice. His doctoral thesis focuses on Economics of Climate Change and Environmental Regulations. He completed his bachelor’s in Statistics, Master’s, and M.Phil. in Demography.
GLO VirtYS project: Weather Shock, Agricultural Productivity, and Infant Health: A Tale of Environmental Justice
We study how income shock due to extreme weather fluctuations causally impacts the birth outcomes. We selected households depended directly on agriculture due to their extreme vulnerability to temperature and rainfall shocks. We find large efficiency loss attributed to weather shock for major food crops to the extent of 20%. However, we find that access to technology provides resilience against weather shock, therefore, causing the heterogeneity in vulnerability across farming households. Based on it, we designed the agriculture-household model, which predicts that health outcomes of child are dependent on income shock due to abrupt change in weather conditions. We tested the hypothesis by introducing weather shock in the cropping season before the conception of child to eliminate the confounding effect of direct impact due to extreme weather conditions. We find that weather shocks in cropping season, increases the likelihood of child mortality, low birth weight, and birth size. We further find that access to technology, financial tools, and economic security net reduces the impact of income loss due to weather shock. Our results suggests that access to resilient capabilities leads to heterogeneous impact across farmer households causing environmental injustice. Further, our findings provide insights into the policy design for long term shift in weather patterns due to climate change and stresses on the inequality in resilience against extreme weather events.
A new GLO Discussion Paper finds that discretionary fiscal policy measures in Austria are key to counteracting the inequality- and poverty-enhancing effect of COVID-19.
Author Abstract: This paper analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on household income in Austria, using detailed administrative labor market data, in combination with micro-simulation techniques, that enable specific labor market transitions to be modeled. We find that discretionary fiscal policy measures in Austria are key to counteracting the inequality- and poverty-enhancing effect of COVID-19. Additionally, we find that females tend to experience a greater loss in terms of market income. The Austrian tax-benefit system, however, reduces this gender differences. Disposable income has dropped by around 1% for both males and females. By comparison, males profit mainly from short-time work scheme, while females profit especially from other discretionary policy measures, such as the one-off payment for children.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
A new paper published ONLINE FIRST with free readlink in the Journal of Population Economics finds that left-behind parents experience lower utility when their adult children migrate.
Published ONLINE FIRST 2021: Journal of Population Economics READLINK: https://rdcu.be/cxiiq
Shu Cai
Author Abstract: This paper examines the impact of children’s migration on the well-being of left-behind parents using panel data on experienced utility measured by the Day Reconstruction Method. Exploiting exogenous variation in exposure to employment shocks at migration destinations for identification, we find that left-behind parents experience lower utility when their adult children migrate. This is partly due to increased working time and less time spent in social activities, and partly due to reduced utility within activity type. The latter effect is consistent with the finding of less physical care and psychological support from children who have migrated. These negative effects dominate the possible benefits of greater income associated with children’s migration.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
Author Abstract: The study replicates the first European field experiment on gay men’s labor market prospects in Greece. Utilizing the same protocol as the original study in 2006-2007, two follow-up field experiments took place in 2013-2014 and 2018-2019. The study estimated that gay men experienced occupational access constraints and wage sorting in vacancies offering lower remuneration. It was found that in 2013-2014 and 2018-2019, gay men experienced increasingly biased treatment compared to 2006-2007. Moreover, the results suggested that unemployment bore an association with occupational access constraints and wage sorting in vacancies offering lower remuneration for gay men. In each of the three experiments, this study captured recruiters’ attitudes toward gay men. A one standard deviation increase in taste-discrimination attitudes against gay men decreased their access to occupations by 9.6%. Furthermore, a one standard deviation increase in statistical-discrimination attitudes against gay men decreased their access to occupations by 8.1%. According to the findings, in 2013-2014 and 2018-2019, firms excluding gay applicants expressed a higher level of taste- and statistical-discrimination attitudes compared to 2006-2007. A gay rights backlash due to the LGBTIQ+ group’s attempt to advance its agenda, rising far-right rhetoric, and prejudice associated with economic downturns experienced in Greece might correspond with increasing biases against gay men.
The Global Labor Organization (GLO) is an independent, non-partisan and non-governmental organization that functions as an international network and virtual platform to stimulate global research, debate and collaboration.
