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This paper discusses the existing literature on migration and innovation, with special emphasis on empirical studies based on patent and inventor data. Other sources of micro-data are examined, too, for comparative purposes. A pilot database, based on patent filings at the European Patent Office is presented. It contains information on individual inventors, including their country of residence and of origin. Preliminary evidence suggests that immigrant inventors contribute to innovation not only in the US, but also in selected European countries, where they often rank among the most productive individuals. Data on returnee inventors to selected countries of origin suggest the phenomenon to be of limited scale, and highly subject to errors of measurement.

This paper has two objectives. First, it describes a new database mapping migratory patterns of inventors, extracted from information included in patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. We explain in detail the information contained in the database and discuss the usefulness and reliability of the underlying data. Second, the paper provides a descriptive overview of inventor migration patterns, based on the information contained in the newly constructed database. Among the largest receiving countries, we find that the United States exhibits by far the highest inventor immigration rate, followed by Australia and Canada. European countries lag behind in attracting inventive talent; in addition, France, Germany, and the UK see more inventors emigrating than immigrating. In relation to the number of home country inventors, Central American, Caribbean and African economies show the largest inventor brain drain.

Health outcomes in India vary substantially across regions. Motivated by mounting evidence of the historical persistence of institutions and behavior, this paper studies the historical origins of this health variation. We examine the long-term consequences of the Protestant medical missionary enterprise that spread throughout India in the nineteenth century. Protestant mission medicine sought to place itself within non-European social and institutional milieus, contributing to the diffusion of Western medicine among the local population. We construct a novel fully geocoded dataset that combines contemporary individual-level data with historical information on missionary activities. We document a robust positive association between proximity to a Protestant medical mission and current individuals' health outcomes. Our analysis indicates that this long-run link is not driven by religious conversion or persistence of infrastructure, but possibly by improvements in individuals' health potential and changes in hygiene and health habits.

This study examines the effect of abolishing user fees from the maternal and child health (MCH) services on child quantity and quality in South Africa in the post-apartheid era. Exploiting exogenous variation in exposure to the policy effect, we find that the policy resulted in lower fertility in households and greater educational attainment of children a decade later. The absence of the effects among children not subject to the policy eliminates channels through heterogeneous preexisting trends or unobserved concurrent changes. The important policy implications are (i) the theoretical predictions of the child quantity-quality tradeoff model characterize reproductive behavior among parents in developing countries; and (ii) MCH policy serves as a motivating force underlying the demographic transition and human capital development.

Why do legal permanent migrants return to their home countries? How do home country conditions influence this decision? This paper uses exogenous home country exchange rate shocks arising from the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis to distinguish return motivations of a national sample of Australian immigrants. On average, a 10% favorable exchange rate shock (a depreciation in the home country currency) leads to a reduced likelihood of return of 0.37 percentage points for migrants. The effect is found to be stronger for those who had pre-existing intentions to return, weaker for those undecided, and zero for those who initially stated their desire to stay. These results favor a life-cycle explanation for migrant behavior and reject the theory that migrants are target earners who seek to invest upon return home.

This paper investigates the effect of the differential pecuniary costs of sons and daughters on fertility decisions. The focus is on dowries in India, which increase the economic returns to sons and decrease the returns to daughters. The paper exploits an exogenous shift in the cost of girls relative to boys arising from a revision in anti-dowry law, which is shown to have decreased dowry transfers markedly. The reform is found to have attenuated the widely documented positive association between daughters and their parents' fertility. The effect is particularly pronounced for more autonomous women and for individuals living in areas characterised by strong preferences for sons.

This paper shows that when donors and recipients care about each other --two-sided altruism -- the presence of asymmetry of information about the donor's income leads very naturally to a signaling game. A donor who cares about the recipient's welfare has incentives to appear richer than he is when the recipient cares about him. Similarly, asymmetry of information regarding the donor's income generates a signaling game in the presence of two-sided altruism. These signaling games put upward pressure on transfers and this pressure increases with the altruism of the recipient.

This paper examines the effects of both permanent and temporary emigration on human capital formation and economic growth of the source regions. To achieve this end, this paper explores the Chinese provincial panel data from 1980 to 2005. First, the fixed effects model is employed to estimate the effect of emigration on school enrollment rates in the source regions. Relative to this aspect, we find that the magnitude (scale) of permanent emigrants (measured by the permanent emigration ratio) is conducive to the improvement of both middle and high schools enrollments. In contrast, the magnitude of temporary emigrants has a significantly positive effect on middle school enrollment but does not have a significant effect on high school enrollment. More interestingly, different educational attainments of temporary emigrants have different effects on school enrollment. Specifically, the share of temporary emigrants with high school education positively affects middle school enrollment, while the share of temporary emigrants with middle school education negatively affects high school enrollment. Second, the instrumental variable method is applied to estimate the effect of emigration on economic growth within the framework of system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). The estimation results suggest that both permanent and temporary emigrations have a detrimental effect on the economic growth of the source regions. Our empirical tests provide some new evidence to the "brain drain" debate, which has recently received increasing attention.

Many families fail to vaccinate their children despite the supply of these services at no cost. This study tests whether personal reminders can increase demand for vaccination. A field experiment was conducted in rural Guatemala in which timely reminders were provided to families whose children were due for a vaccine. The six-month intervention increased the probability of vaccination completion by 2.2 percentage points among all children in treatment communities. Moreover, for children in treatment communities who were due to receive a vaccine, and whose parents were expected to be reminded about that due date, the probability of vaccination completion increased by 4.6 percentage points. The cost of an additional child with complete vaccination due to the intervention is estimated at about $7.50.

This study complements existing literature on the relationship between HIV/AIDS and human capital by introducing previously unexplored indicators and more robust empirical strategies. The overarching purpose is to assess whether previous findings on the relationship withstand empirical scrutiny when alternative indicators and methodologies are employed. Four main HIV/AIDS measurements are regressed on intelligence for a maximum of 195 cross-sectional averages over the past decade. The empirical evidence is based on OLS, IWLS and 2SLS. The following findings are established. First, human capital decreases HIV prevalence, with a higher magnitude on ‘Women's share of population aged 15 and above living with HIV’. This implies improving average human capital levels across communities may be more beneficial to girls above the age of 15 living with HIV. The relatively similar negative magnitudes across other dependent variables implies that increasing human capital decreases deaths from HIV/AIDS by almost the same rate at which it reduces infections to the disease. Moreover, the HIV infection rate in children between the ages of 0 and 14 does not significantly change with improvements in human capital. More policy implications are discussed.

This paper uses microdata for 19 African countries to examine the gender difference in maths test scores amongst primary school children. There is a significant difference in maths test scores in favour of boys, similar to that previously observed in developed countries. This difference cannot be explained by gender differences in school quality, home environment, or within-school gender discrimination in access to schooling inputs. However, the gender gap varies widely with characteristics of the regions in which the pupils live, and these regional characteristics are more predictive of the gender gap than parental education and school characteristics, including teacher gender. At the cross-country level, differences in fertility rates account for nearly half the variation in the gender gap, and this relationship is not due to the correlation between fertility and GDP nor to gender (in)equality as measured by the Gender Gap Index.

This paper tests how migrants' willingness to remit changes when given the ability to direct remittances to educational purposes using different forms of commitment. Variants of a dictator game in a lab-in-the-field experiment with Filipino migrants in Rome are used to examine remitting behavior under varying degrees of commitment. These range from the soft commitment of simply labeling remittances as being for education, to the hard commitment of having funds directly paid to a school and the student's educational performance monitored. The analysis finds that the introduction of simple labeling for education raises remittances by more than 15 percent. Adding the ability to directly send this funding to the school adds only a further 2.2 percent. The information asymmetry between migrants and their most closely connected household is randomly varied, but no significant change is found in the remittance response to these forms of commitment as information varies. Behavior in these games is shown to be predictive of take-up of a new financial product called EduPay, designed to allow migrants to pay remittances directly to schools in the Philippines. This take-up seems largely driven by a response to the ability to label remittances for education, rather than to the hard commitment feature of directly paying schools.

A substantial body of research investigates the design of incentives in firms, yet less is known about incentives in organizations that hire individuals to perform tasks with positive social spillovers. We conduct a field experiment in which agents hired by a public health organization are randomly allocated to four groups. Agents in the control group receive a standard volunteer contract often offered for this type of task, whereas agents in the three treatment groups receive small financial rewards, large financial rewards, and non-financial rewards, respectively. The analysis yields three main findings. First, non-financial rewards are more effective at eliciting effort than either financial rewards or the volunteer contract. The effect of financial rewards, both large and small, is much smaller and not significantly different from zero. Second, non-financial rewards elicit effort both by leveraging intrinsic motivation for the cause and by facilitating social comparison among agents. Third, contrary to existing laboratory evidence, financial incentives do not crowd out intrinsic motivation in this setting.

We assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite (or because of) the substantial increase in global population. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical-level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU). CLGU posits that social welfare increases with population size if and only if the new lives come with a level of living standards higher than that of a critical level . Despite its attractiveness, CLGU poses a number of practical difficulties that may explain why the literature has left it largely unexplored. We address these difficulties by developing new procedures for making partial CLGU orderings. The headline result is that we can robustly conclude that world welfare has increased between 1990 and 2005 if we judge that lives with per capita yearly consumption of more than $1,248 necessarily increase social welfare; the same conclusion applies to Sub-Saharan Africa if and only if we are willing to make that same judgment for lives with any level of per capita yearly consumption above $147. Otherwise, some of the admissible CLGU functions will judge the last two decades' increase in global population size to have lowered global social welfare.

The relation between income and migration intentions can be monotonically decreasing, increasing, or inverse U-shaped, dependent on the level of migration cost relative to wealth and if individuals are credit constrained. Using unique individual level data, covering countries in three geographic regions – sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America – we show that migration intentions respond to individual wealth, and that the pattern differs across the country groups studied in a manner compatible with the predictions of our simple model. We also show that contentment with various dimensions of local amenities, such as public services and security, are key determinants of migration intentions.

Organizations often use non-monetary awards to incentivize performance. Awards may affect behavior through several mechanisms: by conferring employer recognition, by enhancing social visibility, and by facilitating social comparison. In a nationwide health worker training program in Zambia, we design a field experiment to unbundle these mechanisms. We find that employer recognition and social visibility increase performance while social comparison reduces it, especially for low-ability trainees. These effects appear when treatments are announced and persist through training. The findings are consistent with a model of optimal expectations in which low-ability individuals exert low effort in order to avoid information about their relative ability.

The present study simulates the impacts of price surges in 2006-2008 on household poverty in the main Colombian cities. It is found that the price surges increased both extreme and moderate poverty in urban areas in short and medium terms. However, the magnitude of poverty rise is not homogeneous geographically or by household types – e.g., the poorest or less educated households were more badly affected than the wealthier or educated households. We suggest 'demographic targeting' or 'geographical targeting' as a policy option that selects and supports poor households by demographic characteristics or by geographical areas according to the degree of vulnerability. Protecting those households from food price shocks would be still important now given that rising and volatile food prices have continued due to erratic climate patterns and demand and supply conditions along with economic and financial crisis.

Household investment in preventative health products in developing countries is typically low even though the returns to such products are high. In this paper, we experimentally estimate demand curves for health products and test whether (1) information about health risk, (2) cash liquidity, (3) peer effects, and (4) intra-household differences in preferences affect demand. In our main experiment in Kenya involving children’s shoes - critical for preventing hookworm infection - price is by far the most important predictor of purchase. Providing liquidity and targeting women also increased demand. Information had no effect even though we find that genuine learning occurred. We find no peer effects even though people discussed the product purchase decision extensively. We find similar results for price and information in three smaller studies in Guatemala, India, and Uganda in experiments involving soap and multivitamins.

This paper studies the growth dynamics of a developing country under migration. Assuming that human capital formation is subject to a strong enough, positive intertemporal externality, the prospect of migration will increase growth in the home country in the long run. If the external effect is less strong, there exists at least a level effect on the stock of human capital in the home country. In either case, the home country experiences a welfare gain, provided that migration is sufficiently restrictive. These results, obtained in a dynamic general equilibrium setting, extend and strengthen the results of Stark and Wang (2002) obtained in the context of a static model.

Data from two surveys of twins in China are used to contribute to an improved understanding of the role of economic development in affecting gender differences in the trends in, levels of, and returns to schooling observed in China and in many developing countries in recent decades. In particular, we explore the hypothesis that these phenomena reflect differences in comparative advantage with respect to skill and brawn between men and women in the context of changes in incomes, returns to skill, and/or nutritional improvements that are the result of economic development and growth.

Decentralization of decision-making is among the most intriguing recent school reforms, in part because countries went in opposite directions over the past decade and because prior evidence is inconclusive. We suggest that autonomy may be conducive to student achievement in well-developed systems but detrimental in low-performing systems. We construct a panel dataset from the four waves of international PISA tests spanning 2000-2009, comprising over one million students in 42 countries. Relying on panel estimation with country fixed effects, we identify the effect of school autonomy from within-country changes in the average share of schools with autonomy over key elements of school operations. Our results show that autonomy affects student achievement negatively in developing and low-performing countries, but positively in developed and high-performing countries. These results are unaffected by a wide variety of robustness and specification tests, providing confidence in the need for nuanced application of reform ideas.

We provide new estimates of migrant flows into and out of America during the Age of Mass Migration at the turn of the twentieth century. Our analysis is based on a novel data set of administrative records covering the universe of 24 million migrants who entered Ellis Island, New York between 1892 and 1924. We use these records to measure inflows into New York, and then scale-up these figures to estimate migrant inflows into America as a whole. Combining these flow estimates with census data on the stock of foreign-born in America in 1900, 1910 and 1920, we conduct a demographic accounting exercise to estimate out-migration rates in aggregate and for each nationality-age-gender cohort. This exercise overturns common wisdom on two fronts. First, we estimate flows into the US to be 20% and 170% higher than stated in official statistics for the 1900-10 and 1910-20 decades, respectively. Second, once mortality is accounted for, we estimate out-migration rates from the US to be around .6 for the 1900-10 decade and around .75 for the 1910-20. These figures are over twice as high as official estimates for each decade. That migration was effectively a two-way flow between the US and the sending countries has major implications for understanding the potential selection of immigrants that chose to permanently reside in the US, their impact on Americans in labor markets, and institutional change in America and sending countries.

This article explores the economic underpinnings of the Arab spring. We locate the roots of the regiosn's long-term economic failure in a statist model of development that is financed through external windfalls and rests on inefficient forms of intervention and redistribution. We argue that the rising cost of repression and redistribution is calling into question the long-term sustainability of this development model. A singular failure of tyhe Arab world is that it has been unable to develop a private sector that is independent, competetive and intergrated with global markets. We argue that developing such a orivate sector is both a political as well as a regional challenge. In so far as the private sector genertaes incomes that are independent of the rent streams controlled by the state and can pose a direct political challenge, it is viewed as a threat. And, the Arab world's economic fragmentation into isolated geographic units further undermines the prospects for private sector development. We explain this economic fragmentation as a manifestation of dentralized and segmented administrative structures. Revisiting the polictics and geo-politics of regional trade, we argue that overcoming regional economic barriers constitues the single most important collective action problem that the region has faced since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Not only the colonial period, but also the pre-colonial times might have influenced later development patterns. In this study we assess a potential pre-colonial legacy hypothesis for the case of the Andean region. In order to analyze the hypothesis, we study the human capital of Inca Indios, using age-heaping-based techniques to estimate basic numeracy skills. We find that Peruvian Inca Indios had only around half the numeracy level of the Spanish invaders. The hypothesis holds even after adjusting for a number of potential biases. Moreover, the finding has also crucial implications for the narrative of the military crisis of the Inca Empire. A number of explanations have been given as to why the Old American Empires were not able to defend their territory against the Spanish invaders in the early 16th century. We add an economic hypothesis to the debate and test it with new evidence: Were the human capital formation efforts of the Inca economy perhaps too limited, making it difficult to react appropriately to the Spanish challenge?

This paper examines how different types of workers in 17 middle-income countries were affected by labor market retrenchment during the great recession. Impacts on different types of workers varied by country and were only weakly related to the severity of the shock. Among active workers, youth experienced by far the largest adverse impacts on employment, unemployment, and wage employment, particularly relative to older adults. The percentage employment reductions, for example, were greatest for youth in each sector of the economy, as firms reacted to the shock by substituting away from inexperienced workers. Employment rates, as a share of the population, also plummeted for men. Larger drops in male employment were primarily attributable to men's higher initial rate of employment, although men's concentration in the hard-hit industrial sector also played an important role. Within each sector, percentage employment declines were similar for men and women. Added worker effects among women were mild, even among less-educated workers. Differences in labor market outcomes across education groups and urban or rural residence tended to be smaller. These findings bolster the case for targeted support to displaced youth and wage employees. Programs targeted to female and unskilled workers should be undertaken with appropriate caution or empirical support from timely data, as they may not benefit the majority of affected workers.

This paper estimates the distribution of welfare gains due to the trade reforms in India by simultaneously considering the effect on prices of tradable goods and wages. The cost of consumption for each household is affected by the domestic price changes, while wage incomes adjust to these price changes in equilibrium. Three rounds of the Indian Employment and Consumption Surveys are used for the analysis. The price transmission mechanisms are estimated for both rural and urban areas to understand the extent to which the trade reforms are able to affect the domestic prices. In order to assess the distributional effects, a series of nonparametric local linear regressions are estimated. The findings show that households at all per capita expenditure levels had experienced gains as a result of the trade liberalization, while the average effect was generally pro-poor and varied significantly across the per capita expenditure spectrum.

We develop a theory of human capital investment to study the channels through which students react to school quality when deciding on investments in secondary education and above, and to study how educational quality affects economic growth. In a dynamic general equilibrium closed economy, primary education is mandatory but there is an opportunity to continue on in education, which is a private choice. High-quality education increases the returns to schooling, and hence the incentives to accumulate human capital. This is caused by two main effects: higher quality makes higher education accessible to more people (extensive channel), and once individuals decide to participate in higher education, higher quality increases the volume of investment made per individual (intensive channel). Furthermore, educational quality plays a central role in explaining the composition of human capital and the long-run level of income. Cross-country data evidence shows that the proposed channels are quantitatively important and that the effect of the quality and quantity of education on growth depends on the stage of development.

One of the most serious weaknesses of the human development index (HDI) is that it considers only average achievements and does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country or by population subgroups. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have also used aggregate information and there exists no HDI at the household level. This paper provides a method and illustration for calculating the HDI at the household level. This immediately allows the analysis of the HDI by any kind of population subgroups and by household socioeconomic characteristics. Furthermore, it allows to apply any kind of inequality measure to the HDI across population subgroups and over time. We illustrate our approach for 15 developing countries. Inequality in the HDI is largest in poorer countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. We also find large inequalities within countries between population subgroups, particularly by income, location, and education of the household head. We also find considerable inequality when looking at inequality measures like the Theil or the Gini coefficient; within-group inequality is, however, invariably larger than between-group inequality and inequality in the HDI within countries is of similar order of magnitude of inequality in the HDI between countries.

A specially designed household survey for rural China is used to analyse the determinants of aspirations for income, proxied by reported minimum income need, and the determinants of subjective well-being, both satisfaction with life and satisfaction with income. It is found that aspiration income is a positive function of actual income and reference income, and that subjective well-being is raised by actual income but lowered by aspiration income. These findings suggest the existence of a partial ‘Hedonic Treadmill’, and can help to explain why subjective well-being in China appears not to have risen despite rapid economic growth.

This paper studies the effects of remittances from the U.S. on child labor and school attendance in recipient Mexican households. We identify these effects using the impact of the 2008–2009 U.S. recession on remittance receipts. The methodology employed is a differences-in-differences strategy that compares households that were remittance recipients before the crisis with never-recipient households. To avoid possible selection problems, we instrument for membership in the remittance recipient group. We find that the negative shock on remittance receipts caused a significant increase in child labor and a significant reduction of school attendance.

Between 1993 and 1994, extremist militia groups carried out the extermination of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the genocides of Burundi and Rwanda. Nearly one million people were killed and thousands were forcibly uprooted from their homes. Over the course of a few months, Kagera – a region in northwestern Tanzania – received more than 500,000 refugees from these wars. This region is home to a series of geographic natural barriers, which resulted in variation in refugee intensity. I exploit this variation to investigate the short and long run causal effects of hosting refugees on the outcomes of local children. Reduced-form estimates offer evidence of adverse impacts almost 1.5 years after the shock: a worsening of children’s anthropometrics of 0.3 standard deviations, an increase of 15 to 20 percentage points in the incidence of infectious diseases and an increase of roughly 7 percentage points in mortality for children under five. I also exploit intra- and inter-cohort variation and find that childhood exposure to this massive arrival of refugees reduced height in early adulthood by 1.8 cm (1.2%), schooling by 0.2 years (7.1%) and literacy by 7 percentage points (8.6%). Designs using the distance from the village to the border with Rwanda as an alternative instrumental strategy for refugee intensity support the findings. The estimates are robust across a variety of samples, specifications and estimation methods and provide evidence of a previously undocumented indirect effect of civil wars on the well-being of children and subsequent economic growth in refugee-hosting communities.

Within rich countries, a large dispersion in the capacity of generating environmental innovations appears correlated to the level of inequality. Previous works analyse the relationship between inequality and environmental quality in a static setting. This paper builds a dynamic model more suitable to analyze technological externalities driven by the emergence of a new demand for green products. Under fairly general assumptions on technology and preferences, we show that: 1. the relationship between inequality and environmental innovation is highly non-linear and crucially depends on per-capita income; 2. an excessive inequality harms the development of environmental technologies especially in rich countries. Key to our results is the fact that externalities generated by pioneer consumers of green products benefit the entire population only for relatively low income distances. The empirical analysis robustly confirms our theoretical results, that is: whereas for rich countries inequality negatively affects the diffusion of innovations, per-capita income is paramount in poorer ones.

For several centuries before the First World War women's age at first marriage in the west of Europe was higher than in the east (and in the rest of the world). In their low mortality regimes Western Europeans chose lower fertility in part through a higher female age at marriage. This allowed women to increase their human capital both formally and informally in the years before child bearing so that more informed mothers brought up better educated offspring. The demographic pattern influenced the stock of human capital and directly contributed to Western Europe's development advantage. The predicted relations of this economic model of the household are tested with two datasets, one at the county level for England for the second half of the nineteenth century and the other at the national level for Europe 1870–1910.

Using the Cox proportional hazards model this paper empirically investigates how migration of household members and the receipt of remittances affect educational outcomes in Haiti. Based on a theoretical approach it tries to disentangle the effects of both phenomena that have mostly been jointly modeled in previous literature. The results suggest that remittances play an important role for poor households in alleviating budget constraints, whereas no effect of the migrated household head's absence is detected. The latter might be so due to the high imprecision surrounding the estimated hazard ratios. Household wealth, captured via an asset index, is found to have a signi?cant impact on education as well, supporting the idea that budget constraints play a crucial role in schooling decisions in Haiti due to the dominance of private schools and the high poverty rate in the country.

Summary This paper estimates trends in absolute poverty in urban China using the Chinese Household Income Project surveys. Poverty incidence curves are plotted, showing lower poverty in 2002 than in 1988 irrespective of the poverty line chosen. Incomes of the poorest fell during 1988–95, contributing to a rise in inequality. However, inequality has been fairly constant thereafter. Models of the determination of income and poverty reveal widening differentials by education, sex, and Communist Party membership. Income from government anti-poverty programs has little impact on poverty, which has fallen almost entirely due to overall economic growth rather than redistribution.

Summary This paper is among the first to link the literatures on migration and on subjective well-being in developing countries. It poses the question: why do rural–urban migrant households settled in urban China have an average happiness score lower than rural households? Three basic hypotheses are examined: migrants had false expectations about their future urban conditions, or about their future urban aspirations, or about their future selves. Estimated happiness functions and decomposition analyses, based on a 2002 national household survey, indicate that certain features of migrant conditions make for unhappiness, and that their high aspirations in relation to achievement, influenced by their new reference groups, also make for unhappiness. Although the possibility of selection bias among migrants cannot be ruled out, it is apparently difficult for migrants to form unbiased expectations about life in a new and different world.

Trafficking in women has been estimated to generate $12 billion a year, enough to be ranked just after trafficking in weapons and drugs. This paper analyzes working and living conditions of individuals that have reported to the Anti-Trafficking Unit of the International Organization for Migration for assistance and have been identified as ‘victims of trafficking’ for the purpose of ‘sexual exploitation’. We use the theoretical framework of the capability approach to conceptualize well-being deprivation and we estimate a MIMIC model. The utilized indicators measure abuse, freedom of movement, and access to medical care. We conclude that working in secluded spaces worsen well-being conditions of the victims. A better access to medical care and to contraception for all sex workers would improve well-being also for trafficked women. Moreover, criminalization of sex work may move all sex workers in more secluded places, which will also have a negative impact on the well-being of sexually exploited trafficked individuals.

Social capital is a broad term containing the social networks and norms that generate shared understandings, trust and reciprocity, which underpin cooperation and collective action for mutual benefits, and creates the base for economic prosperity. This study deals with the formation of social capital through development of human capital that is created from productive consumption. This paper attempts to formalize incorporation of social capital (SK). This paper sets up a one-sector growth model, where the engine of growth is capital accumulation. The production function for final output is of the AK – type, which uses aggregate capital as single input. Aggregate capital is represented by a Cobb-Douglas index comprising three types capital. Human capital accumulation results from productive consumption and an increase in social capital is driven by the existence of human capital. The optimal growth rate of consumption is derived and it is shown that both human capital and social capital accumulation affect the equilibrium growth rate. Finally, paper presents some empirical evidence on social capital and economic growth.

We analyze empirically the impact of urban agglomeration on Italian wages. Using micro-data from the Bank of Italy's Survey of Household Income and Wealth for the years 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2002 on more than 22,000 employees distributed in 242 randomly drawn local labor markets, we test whether the structure of wages varies with urban scale. We find that every additional 100,000 inhabitants in the local labor market raises earnings by 0.1 percent. The use of a geographical approach enables us to state that this effect decays very rapidly with distance, losing significance beyond approximately 12 kilometers. We also find that urbanization does not affect returns to experience and that it reduces returns to education and to tenure with current firm, while providing a premium to worker supervisors and office workers.

Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century. There has been (1) a dramatic drop in fertility and greater parental investment in children; (2) a rise in married female labor-force participation; (3) a significant decline in marriage; (4) a higher degree of positive assortative mating; (5) more children living with a single mother; and (6) shifts in social norms governing premarital sex and married women’s roles in the workplace. Macroeconomic models explaining these aggregate trends are surveyed. The relentless flow of technological progress and its role in shaping family life are stressed. (JEL D13, J12, J13, J16, J22, O33, Z13)

That historical inequality can affect long run macroeconomic performance has been argued by a large literature on ‘endogenous inequality’ using models of indivisibilities in occupational choice, in the presence of borrowing constraints. These models are characterized by a continuum of steady states, and absence of mobility in any steady state. We augment such a model with heterogeneity in agents’ abilities in order to generate occupational mobility in steady state. Steady states with mobility are shown to be generically locally unique and finite in number. We provide forms of heterogeneity for which steady state is globally unique, and others where they are non-unique. Agent heterogeneity may also cause competitive equilibrium dynamics to fail to converge, but convergence can be restored in the presence of sufficient ‘inertia’ or occupation switching costs.

Despite substantial regional expenditure at both national and community level, European regional policies do not appear to deliver. Evidence suggests that neither efficiency gains nor reduced regional inequalities result. If there is any positive impact at all, then it is at most a redistributional one. If transfers are mainly redistributional in nature, would policies based on non-distortionary financing be a better route to follow? We consider the alternatives to a distortionary regional policy that forces the delocation of activities. Are non-distortionary policies always relatively more efficient than distortionary ones? We analyse these questions employing a new economic geography model, which also takes into account the importance of knowledge spillovers for productivity, industry location and policy. We show that the effectiveness of different regional policies depends on (i) intra-industry knowledge spillovers, (ii) inter-industry knowledge spillovers and (iii) trade costs. Our analysis suggests that the European approach to the elimination of regional inequalities may, relatively, be the more costly alternative.

The paper analyses a two-sector model of endogenous growth with two common features of economic development: stages of sustained growth and underdevelopment traps. The model also demonstrates the transitional issues of a temporary underdevelopment trap , seemingly sustainable growth , and a slowdown in productivity growth . The temporary underdevelopment trap occurs when an economy exhibits a regime of extensive growth (i.e. slowly declining growth in physical capital with no growth in human capital), but thereafter starts a transition to sustained growth. Seemingly sustainable growth happens when an economy exhibits a regime of intensive growth (i.e. both capitals grow initially) but the growth of human capital subsequently ceases and the economy eventually finds itself in a zero growth trap. The model also exhibits the possibility of a slowdown in productivity growth as a temporary phenomenon during the transition from the low growth stage to the high growth stage of an economy facing a new “industrial” revolution.

This study examines how the educational level attained by individuals affects their migration propensity. Using an original 2006 Ecuadorian survey, which gathered information on household members who were not in the country at the time of the survey (i.e., emigrants), we implement a Regression Discontinuity Design and control for potential endogeneity of the education explanatory variable based on the 1977 educational reform in Ecuador. Our results provide evidence of positive self-selection among migrants. Taking into account the 27-57 age sample, an individual with a lower secondary level of education increases the migration propensity by 31.30%; this propensity is even higher (34.47%) when the sample of migrants is restricted to the urban areas. Considering both country-specific characteristics and gender differentials, our results do not indicate a significant impact of an increase in human capital on the male migration propensity. However, there is a positive and significant effect on the female migration propensity, in particular, for women from larger cities. The results are consistent with theoretical models related to positive self-selection in response to labor market distortions, such as the disparities between genders.

China's linguistic and geographic diversity leads many Chinese individuals to identify themselves and others not simply as Chinese, but rather by their native place and provincial origin. Negative personality traits are often attributed to people from specific areas. People from Henan, in particular, appear to be singled out as possessing a host of negative traits. Such prejudice does not necessarily lead to wage discrimination. Whether or not it does depends on the nature of the local labor markets. This chapter uses data from the 2008 and 2009 migrant surveys of the Rural-Urban Migration in China Project (RUMiC) to explore whether native-place wage discrimination affects migrant workers in China's urban labor markets. We analyze the question of wage discrimination among migrants by estimating wage equations for men and women, controlling for human capital characteristics, province of origin, and destination city. Of key interest here are the variables representing provinces of origin. We find no systemic differences by province of origin in the hourly wages of male and female migrants. However, in a few specific cases, we find that migrants from a particular province earn significantly less than those from local areas. Male migrants from Henan in Shanghai are paid much less than their fellow migrants from Anhui. In the Jiangsu cities of Nanjing and Wuxi, female migrants from nearby Anhui are paid much less than intra-provincial Jiangsu migrants.

This chapter connects population aging with international migration. After documenting the trends for both, we review the supply-push and demand-pull determinants of migration, focusing particularly on the role of age and aging. We subsequently discuss the literature concerning the implications of migration in the context of aging for labor markets, health and public budgets including the political economy context. Although immigration is sometimes suggested as a solution for the aging problem, the existing academic literature from different fields is more cautious about its role and potential. While large-scale selective immigration might contribute to alleviating demographic pressures, it is unlikely that immigration will increase to the unrealistically large numbers needed.

The need for graduates who would be productive citizens able to contribute significantly to the Nigerian economy led to the overhaul of the old education system 6-5-4 and the implementation of the 6-3-3-4 system, with its first set of graduates from secondary schools in 1988. The main objective of the 6-3-3- 4 system was to produce self-reliant graduates with better labor market skills and earning potential. In this paper, we investigate to what extent this goal was achieved. Using a Regression Discontinuity (RD) design, we examine if graduates from the 6-3-3-4 system experienced an improvement in welfare compared to those from the old system. We measure welfare improvement using several indicators such as a decline in poverty likelihood and poverty gap, an increase in the probability of employment and an increase in wages. Our results provide some evidence that the new system led to a decrease in the likelihood of being poor compared to those who passed through the old system. We also provide evidence of higher wages for select participants. We do not find any consistent evidence that the 6-3-3-4 system increased the probability of being employed when we compare participants from both systems. Our results suggest that while the system change may not have met some of its critical objectives, it cannot be viewed as totally ineffective.

Same-type teachers are extolled as a way to improve learning outcomes of socially disadvantaged students. This paper uses a relatively understudied social characteristic, caste, to study whether same-type teachers improve learning in a low-income country. Rich longitudinal data from Pakistan allows identification of causal effects using child fixed effects specifications. Low caste boys have significantly higher learning outcomes when taught by high caste teachers. Low caste boys have higher aspirations, and their parents spend significantly more time helping them with homework, when taught by these teachers. These results illustrate that, contrary to previous findings, in some settings different-type teachers may also promote educational attainment and aspirations, and thus intergenerational mobility.

This paper first finds a clear pattern of child gender difference in family migration in China. Specifically, our estimates show that on average, the first child being a son increases the father's migration probability by 25.2 percent. We hypothesize that the family's competitive earning incentive for sons drives this child gender effect on family migration: parents migrate to earn more money in an attempt to improve their sons' relative standing in response to the ever-rising pressure in China's marriage market. This competitive-earning-incentive hypothesis is then supported by additional empirical evidence. We further find that, facing heavier financial pressure from the marriage market, parents spend less on their sons' education and more on marriage and buying houses and durable goods. This gender difference in resource allocation, together with the absentee-father problem resulting from paternal migration, may unexpectedly adversely affect boys' long-run human capital development in China.

We investigate how early life circumstances — childhood health and socioeconomic status (SES) — are associated with labor market outcomes over an individual’s entire life cycle. A life cycle approach provides insights not only into which labor market outcomes are associated with adverse childhood events but also into whether these associations show up early or only later in working life, and whether they vanish or persist over the life cycle. The analysis is conducted using the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, which contains retrospective information on early life circumstances and full work histories for over 20,000 individuals in thirteen European countries. We find that the associations between early life circumstances and (accumulated) labor market outcomes vary over an individual’s life cycle. For men and women, the effect of childhood SES on lifetime earnings accumulates over the life cycle through the associations with both working years and annual earnings. Moreover, for men this association with lifetime earnings reverses sign from negative to positive over their working life. We also find a smaller, positive long-term association between childhood health and lifetime earnings operating mainly through annual earnings and only to a lesser extent through working years, and which is not present at the beginning of the working life for women. Most of these life cycle profiles differ between European country-groups. Finally, for women we find a so-called buffering effect, i.e. that a higher parental SES reduces the negative impact of poor health during childhood on accumulated earnings over the life cycle.