How does the US labor market absorb low-skilled immigration? In the short run, high-immigration locations see their low-skilled labor force increase, native low-skilled wages decrease, and the ...relative price of rentals increase. Internal relocation dissipates this shock spatially. In the long run, the only lasting consequences are (a) worse labor market conditions for low-skilled natives who entered the labor force in high-immigration years, and (b) lower housing prices in high-immigrant locations, when immigrant workers disproportionately enter the construction sector and lower construction costs. I use a quantitative dynamic spatial equilibrium many-region model to obtain the policy-relevant counterfactuals.
We show that universities in the United States that provide stronger royalty incentives to faculty scientists generate greater license income, controlling for university characteristics. We use ...pre-sample data on university patenting to control for the potential endogeneity of royalty shares. Faculty responds to royalties both in the form of cash and research lab support, indicating both pecuniary and intrinsic research motivations. The impact of incentives is larger in private than in public universities, and we provide new survey evidence on the organization and objectives of university licensing offices to explain this difference. Royalty incentives work both by raising faculty effort and sorting scientists across universities. The primary impact of incentives is to increase the quality rather than the quantity of inventions.
Drawing on the agency theory, corporate governance, and international business literatures, the authors link board characteristics and managerial incentives to the choice between acquisitions and ...joint ventures by firms entering foreign markets. Hypothesized relationships are examined in the context of 383 acquisition and 171 joint venture entries undertaken by relatively nondiversified firms in the U.S. manufacturing sector during the period 1991 to 1999. Findings indicate that firms with boards characterized by a higher proportion of outside directors and independent leadership structures (i.e., the absence of duality) are more inclined to favor acquisitions over joint ventures in foreign market entry. Likewise, the data reveal that firms where insiders have greater equity ownership and compensation structures that are more closely linked to long-term firm performance prefer acquisitions over joint ventures. Implications of the findings along with directions for future research are discussed.
"The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of ...their timing. This violence erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the west. In trying to account for this outburst, most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern west. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground."-fromThe Myth of Ethnic War
V. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict.
Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon's view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon's noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.
This paper contributes to the literature on obtaining unbiased estimates of neighborhood effects, explored in the context of a centralized social welfare state. We employ a longitudinal database ...comprised of all working age adults in metropolitan Sweden 1991–1999 to investigate the degree to which neighborhood income mix relates to subsequent labor incomes of adults and how this relationship varies by gender and employment status. We control for unobserved, time-invariant individual characteristics by estimating a first-difference equation of changes in average incomes between the 1991–1995 and 1996–1999 periods. We further control for unobserved time varying characteristics through an analysis of non-movers. These methods substantially reduce the magnitude of the apparent effect of neighborhood shares of low-, middle- and high-income males. Nevertheless, statistically and substantively significant neighborhood effects persist, though relationships are nonlinear and vary by gender and employment status. Males who are not fully employed appear most sensitive to neighborhood economic mix in all contexts.
We specify a dynamic programming model that addresses the interplay among health, financial resources, and the labor market behavior of men late in their working lives. We model health as a latent ...variable, for which self-reported disability status is an indicator, and allow self-reported disability to be endogenous to labor market behavior. We use panel data from the Health and Retirement Study. While we find large impacts of health on behavior, they are substantially smaller than in models that treat self-reports as exogenous. We also simulate the impacts of several potential reforms to the Social Security program.
The Yugoslav break up and conflict have given rise to a considerable literature offering dramatically different interpretations of what happened. But just how do the various interpretations relate to ...each other? This ambitious new book by Sabrina Ramet, an eminent commentator on recent Balkan politics and history, reviews and analyses more than 130 books about the troubled region and compares their accounts, theories, and interpretations of events. Ramet surveys the major debates which divide the field, alternative accounts of the causes of Yugoslavia's violent collapse, and the scholarly debates concerning humanitarian intervention. Rival accounts are presented side by side for easy comparison. Thinking about Yugoslavia examines books on Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo which were published in English, German, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, and Italian, thus offering the English-speaking reader a unique insight into the controversies.
In the aftermath of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, the discovery of unmarked mass graves revealed Europe's worst atrocity since World War II: the genocide in the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica.To Know ...Where He Liesprovides a powerful account of the innovative genetic technology developed to identify the eight thousand Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys found in those graves and elsewhere, demonstrating how memory, imagination, and science come together to recover identities lost to genocide. Sarah E. Wagner explores technology's import across several areas of postwar Bosnian society-for families of the missing, the Srebrenica community, the Bosnian political leadership (including Serb and Muslim), and international aims of social repair-probing the meaning of absence itself.
We find that presidential and congressional influences affect the rate of disaster declaration and the allocation of FEMA disaster expenditures across states. States politically important to the ...president have a higher rate of disaster declaration by the president, and disaster expenditures are higher in states having congressional representation on FEMA oversight committees. Election year impacts are also found. Our models predict that nearly half of all disaster relief is motivated politically rather than by need. The findings reject a purely altruistic model of FEMA assistance and question the relative effectiveness of government versus private disaster relief.
Increasingly, economists are examining how the dynamics within households affect the outcomes of household decisions. This paper uses data from the 1991/92 and the 1998/99 Ghana Living Standards ...Surveys to examine how the share of assets owned by women in Ghanaian households affects household expenditure patterns. In this analysis, assets include business assets, savings, and farmland. The results indicate that women's share of assets do have an impact on household budget shares for a number of expenditure categories in each time period. The effects are robust to considering only the share of farmland held by women. Although the number of households in which women own land is much smaller than the number of households in which women own assets, the coefficients on the share of household land owned by women is statistically significant in explaining five of the nine budget categories in each time period. In particular, in both periods, women's share of farmland significantly increased budget shares on food. Finally, the paper considers the patterns of poverty and asset holdings over this time period.
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