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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.

Against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity in time design to estimate the effect of interest. Our results indicate that hate crime has a substantial negative effect on several mental health indicators, including the Mental Component Summary score and the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 score. The effects are stronger for refugees with closer geographic proximity to the focal hate crime and refugees with low country-specific human capital. While the estimated effect is only transitory, we argue that negative mental health shocks during the critical period after arrival have important long-term consequences. Keywords: Mental health, hate crime, migration, refugees, human capital.

The large literature that aims to find evidence of climate migration delivers mixed findings. This meta-regression analysis i) summarizes direct links between adverse climatic events and migration, ii) maps patterns of climate migration, and iii) explains the variation in outcomes. Using a set of limited dependent variable models, we meta-analyze thus-far the most comprehensive sample of 3,625 estimates from 116 original studies and produce novel insights on climate migration. We find that extremely high temperatures and drying conditions increase migration. We do not find a significant effect of sudden-onset events. Climate migration is most likely to emerge due to contemporaneous events, to originate in rural areas and to take place in middle-income countries, internally, to cities. The likelihood to become trapped in affected areas is higher for women and in low-income countries, particularly in Africa. We uniquely quantify how pitfalls typical for the broader empirical climate impact literature affect climate migration findings. We also find evidence of different publication biases., CEPA Discussion Papers; 29

We exploit the bilateral and skill dimensions from recent data sets of international migration to test for the existence of Zipf's and Gibrat's Laws in the context of aggregate and high-skilled international immigration and emigration using graphical, parametric and non-parametric analysis. The top tails of the distributions of aggregate and high-skilled immigrants and emigrants adhere to a Pareto distribution with an exponent of unity i.e. Zipf's Law holds. We find some evidence in favour of Gibrat's Law holding for immigration stocks, i.e. that the growth in stocks is independent of their initial values and stronger evidence that immigration densities are diverging over time. Conversely, emigrant stocks are converging in the sense that countries with smaller emigrant stocks are growing faster than their larger sovereign counterparts. Lastly, high skilled immigration and emigration stocks expressed in levels or as densities all exhibit signs of convergence. We conclude by discussing some competing mechanisms that could be driving the observed patterns including: differing fertility rates, reductions in emigration restrictions, migrant sorting and selective immigration policies, immigrant networks and persisting wage differentials.

This paper presents the problem of workers lay off and loss along with their exit from the organization its key competencies - skills and knowledge. Importance of management of key competencies was described. The paper also presents outplacement as a way to maintain core competencies even during reducing the human resources within the enterprises. Andrzej Klimczuk

We investigate how the intensity of Ramadan affects educational outcomes by exploiting spatio-temporal variation in annual fasting hours. Longer fasting hours are related to increases in student performance in a panel of TIMMS test scores (1995–2019) across Muslim countries but not other countries. Results are confirmed in a panel of PISA test scores (2003–2018) allowing within country-wave comparisons of Muslim to non-Muslim students across Europe. We provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that a demanding Ramadan during adolescence affects educational performance by facilitating formation of social capital and social identity via increased religious participation and shared experiences among students. published

In this paper, we study the effect of exogenous global crop price changes on migration from agricultural and non-agricultural households in Sub-Saharan Africa. We show that, similar to the effect of positive local weather shocks, the effect of a locally-relevant global crop price increase on household out-migration depends on the initial household wealth. Higher international producer prices relax the budget constraint of poor agricultural households and facilitate migration. The order of magnitude of a standardized price effect is approx. one third of the standardized effect of a local weather shock. Unlike positive weather shocks, which mostly facilitate internal rural-urban migration, positive income shocks through rising producer prices only increase migration to neighboring African countries, likely due to the simultaneous decrease in real income in nearby urban areas. Finally, we show that while higher producer prices induce conflict, conflict does not play a role for the household decision to send a member as a labor migrant., CEPA Discussion Papers; 26

In rural areas of LDCs, because of the existence of market imperfections, health and nutrition status may depend on the levels of specific agricultural productions and not only on the income level. However, these specific impacts have never been studied. We estimate, from a sequential technological model incorporating interactions between health and nutrition, changes in health and nutrition status of autarkic agricultural households in Rwanda which are due to variations in socio-demographic characteristics and in levels of specific crops. The model is supported by several tests. The estimations take into account cluster-fixed effects and the sampling scheme. The food outputs have generally beneficial influences on health and nutrition, while the traditional beers output has a negative impact. A policy based on incentives for substituting cultures may be particularly favourable to the health and nutrition of peasants.

Surprisingly little is known about the impact resource booms on income inequality in resource rich countries (Ross, 2007). This paper develops a simple theory, in the context of a two sector growth model in which learning-by-doing drives growth, to explain the time path of inequality following a resource boom. Under plausible conditions, we find that income inequality will fall in the short run immediately after a boom, and will then increase steadily over time as the economy grows, until the initial impact of the boom on inequality disappears. Using panel co-integration methodology for a sample of 90 countries between 1965 and 1999, we test the predictions of the model empirically. We find strong evidence in support of the theory. Resource booms, especially mineral booms, lower inequality in the year of the boom. This effect then gradually diminishes over time until inequality returns to its pre-boom level in the long run.

In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused over half a million deaths, making it one of the worst in recent history. The mortality impacts are clearly signi cant. But what of the survivors? This paper provides the first estimates the long-term impact of the famine twenty years later, on the height of young adults aged 19-22 years who experienced this severe shock as infants during the crisis. An innovative feature of the analysis is that famine intensity is measured at the household level, while impacts are assessed using a di fference-in-di fferences comparison across siblings, and compared with an IV cross-section, using rainfall as an instrument for the shock. We find that by adulthood, a ffected children who were aged of 12-36 months at the peak of the crisis are signi cantly shorter than the older cohort, and their una ffected peers, by at least 5cm. There are no signi ficant e ffects on those in utero during the crisis, and we cannot rule out that for this cohort, the selection e ffect dominates scarring. Indicative calculations show that for the aff ected group such height loss may lead to income losses of around 5% per year over their lifetime. The evidence also suggests that the relief operations at the time made little di fference.

This paper tests the external validity of a simple Dictator Game as a laboratory analogue for a naturally occurring policy-relevant decision-making context. In Uganda, where teacher absenteeism is a problem, primary school teachers' allocations to parents in a Dictator Game are positively but weakly correlated with their time allocations to teaching and, so, negatively correlated with their absenteeism. Guided by a simple theoretical model, we find that the correlation can be improved by allowing for (a) variations in behavioural reference points across teachers and schools and (b) the positive effect of some School Management Committees on teacher attendance.

Parental attitudes regarding the value of education may determine whether some, none or all school – aged children in a household are enrolled and how much formal education they will eventually complete. To the extent that attitudes are important and can be adequately measured, they should explain household demand for schooling in the absence of constraints. However, the attitudes which people express may be inconsistent with their behaviour when faced with schooling choices for their own children. If attitudes do not explain actual enrolment, the causes of this discrepancy must be addressed. This paper attempts to measure attitudes, explain their formation and investigate the role of attitudes in the allocation of human capital. Parental attitudes toward schooling are found generally to be favourable, and differences in attitudes help explain household enrolment decisions. However, attitudes alone cannot account for low enrolment in rural Ethiopia. High direct and opportunity costs of schooling also limit school participation in the face of credit constraints

This research 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 that of rural households? It examines the hypothesis that migrants have false expectations because they cannot foresee how their aspirations will adapt to their new situation, and draws on research on both psychology and sociology. Estimated happiness functions and decomposition analyses, based on a 2002 national household survey, suggest that their high aspirations in relation to achievement, influenced by their new reference groups, make for unhappiness. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis.

The empirical literature on the economics of happiness has grown rapidly, and much has been learned about the determinants of subjective well-being. Less attention has been paid to its normative implications. Taking China as a case study, this paper first summarises empirical results on the determinants of subjective well-being and then considers whether that evidence can be used for social evaluation. Different criteria for social evaluation give very different answers: on the one hand, real income per capita and the human development index have risen rapidly in recent years but, on the other hand, subjective well-being appears not to have risen at all. Ultimately a value judgement is required: arguments are presented for and against including subjective well-being, either alone or with other criteria, in the social welfare function.

This paper studies the effects of orphanhood on health and education outcomes of children in Tanzania. Using an original dataset on members of the extended family networks of orphaned children, I assess by how much the effects of orphanhood are reduced due to a systematic placement of the orphans within the family network. I find that orphanhood has significant negative impacts on female orphans` welfare in terms of health and education, not however for male orphans. I then provide evidence that the selection of caretakers reduces the negative impact of orphanhood on years of education by one year relative to caretaking by the average family within the family network.

This paper examines migrations' choice of destination conditional on migration. To this end, we design an empirical strategy which remedies both migration selection and unobserved heterogeneity problems. The study uses data from two rounds of Nepal Living Standard Surveys and a Population Census and examine how the choice of a migration destination is influenced by income differentials and other covariates. We find distance, population density, and social proximity to have a strong significant effect: migrants move primarily to proximate, high population density areas where many people share their language and ethnic background. Better access to amenities is significant as well. Differentials in average income across districts are significant in univariate comparisons but not once we control for other covariates. Differentials in consumption expenditures are statistically significant but smaller in magnitude than other determinants. It is differentials in absolute, not relative, consumption that seem to matter most to work migrants. Except for the latter, results are robust to different specifications and datasets.

What is the impact of joining the European Union on a small, less developed economy? This is the general question driving this research paper. In particular, the role of factor movements in explaining real wage behavior in Portugal after its entry in the European Union (EU) is evaluated. Based on these results, counterfactual exercises are performed to measure the impact of foreign investment and emigration on skilled and unskilled wages between 1985 and 1999. We find a small role for labor movements, and a more important one for capital inflows. This should constitute a good starting point to think about the consequences of the Eastern enlargement of the EU and of other integration experiences that abolish barriers to factor mobility.

Social instability is a concept that economists rarely analyse, and yet it can lurk behind much economic policy-making. China’s leadership has often publicly expressed its concerns to avoid ‘social instability’. It is viewed as a threat both to the political order and to the continued rapid growth of the economy. This threat to growth in turn endangers the maintenance of social stability. This paper examines the likely economic determinants of social instability, using both surveys and other evidence. After explaining the determinants of China’s rapid growth, the paper goes on to examine the likely mechanisms by which social instability can affect the growth rate. There is a case for more research on the role of social instability in the economic development process.

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.

Using new data matching remittances and monthly payroll disbursals, we demonstrate how fluctuations in migrants' earnings in the United Arab Emirates affect their remittances. We consider three types of income fluctuations that are observable by families at home: seasonalities, weather shocks and a labor reform. Remittances move with all of these income changes. Remittances do not move with an individual's growth in earnings over time. The slope of the relationship between earnings and time in the UAE varies across individuals and is not easy to observe by families. Thus, a key characteristic that drives remittance behavior is the observability of income rather than other features of these fluctuations. The results are consistent with a private information model where remittances are viewed by the migrant worker as payments to their families in an income-sharing contract.

More than two dozen developing countries have implemented policies to increase teacher compensation in rural schools. We evaluate the impact of the Gambian hardship allowance, which provides a salary premium of 30–40% to primary school teachers in remote locations, on student performance. A geographic discontinuity in the policy’s implementation provides identifying variation. We find no effects of the hardship allowance on average test scores. However, we find suggestive evidence that student performance improved at the top of the test score distribution and fell at the bottom. Our findings indicate that the substantial, unconditional salary increases earned by Gambian teachers had little to no effect on average student performance, with gains limited to the best students.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the long-run and short-run relationship between factor accumulation (i.e. physical capital and human capital) and economic growth by calculating the stocks of human capital and real physical capital. Design/methodology/approach The study uses endogenous growth model, where GDP per worker is the dependent variable and factor accumulation (real physical capital per worker and human capital) is the explanatory variable under the autoregressive distributive lag framework from 1973 to 2014 for Pakistan. Findings The results suggest that there is a long-run relationship between factor accumulation and GDP per worker in Pakistan. Findings of the study are consistent with the endogenous growth model suggesting that accumulation of human capital increases labor productivity, employment level and per capita income, and causes economic growth. Practical implications Developing countries like Pakistan should increase share of human capital for economic development. Government should invest in the education sector because investment in human capital has a large potential of productivity growth and welfare increase in developing countries. Originality/value This study challenges the notion of human capital and real physical capital stock used by different researchers. Considering human capital as a core factor of production, a series of human capital as average year of schooling is calculated by utilizing the perpetual inventory method.

In this paper, we assess empirically whether financial inclusion contributes to reducing income inequality when controlling for other key factors, such as economic development and fiscal policy. We conclude that financial inclusion contributes to reducing income inequality to a significant degree, while the size of the financial sector does not. Although our results are still preliminary and constrained by data limitations, they still bear significant policy implications. More specifically, fostering financial inclusion has one more important by-product, which had hardly been analyzed yet, namely reducing income inequality. More specifically, given the broad definition of financial inclusion used in our analysis, promoting financial inclusion implies facilitating the use of credit to low-income households, as well as granting credit to small and medium-sized enterprises.

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.

This paper studies the interaction of incentive pay and social distance in the dissemination of information.We analyse theoretically as well as empirically the effect of incentive pay when agents have pro-social objectives,but also preferences over dealing with one social group relative to another. In a randomised field experiment under taken across 151 villages in South India,local agents were hired to spread information about a public health insurance programme.Relative to flat pay,incentive pay improves knowledge transmission to households that are socially distant from the agent,but not to households similar to the agent. public services,information constraints,incentive pay, social proximity,knowledge transmission

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 studies the effect of changes in the return to human capital on the fertility–education relationship. The setting is in Anhui Province, China in the thirteenth to twentieth centuries. Over this period, key changes occurred in the civil service examination system, providing a means to test whether incentives for acquiring education influenced fertility decisions. I form an intergenerationally linked dataset from over 43,000 individuals from all social strata to examine the evidence for a child quantity–quality tradeoff. First, as the civil service examination system became more predictable and less discretionary starting in the seventeenth century, raising the return to human capital, I find evidence that households with a lower number of children had a higher chance that one of their sons would participate in the state examinations. This finding is robust to accounting for differences in resources, health, parental human capital, and demographic characteristics. Importantly, the finding is not limited to a small subset of rich households but present in the sample as a whole. Second, the negative relationship between fertility and education disappeared as the lower chance to become an official during the nineteenth century implied a decline in the return to human capital. Taken together, my findings support the hypothesis that fertility choices respond to changes in the return to human capital.

This paper considers the political economy of financial development in an overlapping generations model that incorporates credit market imperfections, and shows that income inequality is a determinant of financial and economic development. Individuals have an opportunity to start an investment project at a fixed cost, but their income to finance the cost is unequal. The government proposes a policy financed by taxation that mitigates credit market imperfections, the implementation of which is determined through majority voting. The policy benefits middle-income individuals who can start the investment only after the implementation of the policy. The policy is, however, against the interest of the rich who wish to block such new entry, and that of the poor who wish to avoid the tax burden. Whether the policy obtains majority support depends on income inequality. High income inequality makes the policy hard to implement, which causes financial and economic underdevelopment.

This paper addresses the issue of socioeconomic integration of forced return migrants, focusing on the Maghreb countries. Starting from the hypothesis that the return has to be prepared, we test whether a disruption in the migration cycle (such as deportation) increases the individual’s vulnerability and affects his integration from both a structural and sociocultural point of view, using the 2006 MIREM survey. We find that forced returnees are more vulnerable to negative labour market outcomes compared to voluntary returnees. The absence of forced returnees from the labour market, or their underperformances, creates a net loss for the origin country and also incentives to re-migrate. The negative effect is statistically significant not only immediately after return, but also in the long run, at survey time. Forced return is also significantly and negatively correlated with sociocultural integration, reflecting a marginalization of deported migrants in their home environment, which may act as a re-emigration incentive. _________________________________ Dans ce papier j’analyse l’intégration socioéconomique des migrants qui sont forcés de rentrer dans leur pays d’origine, avec un focus sur les pays du Maghreb. Ayant comme point de départ l’hypothèse que le retour doit être préparé, je teste si une interruption dans le cycle migratoire (telle que l’expulsion) accroit la vulnérabilité des individus et impacte leur intégration, à la fois d’un point de vue structurel et socioculturel, en utilisant l’enquête MIREM. Les résultats montrent que les migrants expulsés sont plus vulnérables et réussissent moins bien sur le marché du travail dans le pays d’origine, par rapport aux migrants qui ont choisi volontairement de rentrer. L’exclusion des rapatriés forcés du marché du travail, ou leur situation précaire, représente une perte nette pour le pays d’origine et résulte en une plus forte incitation à ré-émigrer. L’effet négatif de l’expulsion sur les performances sur le marché du travail est statistiquement significatif juste après le retour, mais également à plus long terme, au moment de l’enquête. Le retour forcé est également significativement et négativement corrélé avec le degré d’intégration socioculturelle, reflétant une marginalisation des migrants expulsés dans leur environnement d’origine.

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.

An extensive body of research related to immigrants in a variety of countries has documented a "healthy immigrant effect" (HIE). When immigrants arrive in the host country they are healthier than comparable native populations, but their health status may deteriorate with additional years in the country. HIE is explained through the positive self-selection of the health of immigrants and the positive selection, screening and discrimination applied by the host countries. In this paper we study the health assimilation of immigrants within the context of selection and migration policies. Using SHARE data we are able to compare Israel and Europe that have fundamentally different migration policies. Israel has virtually unrestricted open gates for Jewish people around the world, who in turn have ideological rather than economic considerations to move. European countries have selective policies with regards to the health, education and wealth of migrants, who self-select themselves. Our hypothesis is that the HIE, evidenced in many countries will not be found in Israel. Instead, immigrants to Israel may arrive with lower health than that of natives and improve their health with residence in the country, due to the universal health coverage and generous socio-economic support of the government. Our results provide evidence that a) immigrants to Israel have compromised health and suffer from many health ailments upon arrival, making them less healthy than comparable natives. Their health does not improve for up to twenty years of living in Israel, after which they become similar to natives; b) immigrants to Europe have better health than natives upon arrival and up to eleven years since arrival in the host country, after which they are not significantly different than natives. Our results are important for policy.

This study estimates household vulnerability in the Philippines using a three-level and longitudinal linear random-coefficient model whereby vulnerability is decomposed into idiosyncratic and covariate components. Our three-wave panel data covering the period 2003-2009 allow us to analyse poverty situations in both vulnerability and poverty persistence dimensions. A majority of the poor and a third of the non-poor are found to be vulnerable to unobservable shocks, while more susceptible to unobservable idiosyncratic shocks than to covariate shocks. Adequate safety nets should be provided for vulnerable households with less-educated and agriculturally-engaged or jobless heads, rural dwellers, or with more members and/or dependents.

Changes in the 21st century are happening more quickly, unexpectedly, not always in the way desired for the smooth functioning enterprises are turning up. It is domain of the globalization, where new events - chances or threats, cause challenges of the market, before which at present permanently all enterprises are being put. More and more he depends on immaterial resources of the enterprise which they constitute about his strategic potential. Companies form and are developing abilities, is exchanging them for competence which are becoming a base of their competitiveness. In this process he is becoming crucial conditioning, not that much what optimum, but competent managing the intellectual capital, of which meaning in the last period still is growing, and joint employing all organizational units is deciding on the market success. Some work demands a lot of the knowledge, of experience and the independent and custom thinking than other. It is essential for all employers in order to notice these differences creating the principle of the management new ketegoria of specialists, having a useful knowledge for functioning of the enterprise - with knowledge workers. Therefore an attempt to show the management system is a purpose of this article with knowledge workers in contemporary enterprises, based on conducted examinations, at turn 2013 and of 2014, in 100 large firms, acting in the area of the Baltic Sea Region.

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.

We study the political economy of migration policies in the oil-rich and non-democratic Gulf countries where different economic groups have divergent preferences over the migration policy choices. We consider two policy dimensions: a) the number of migrants allowed into the country and b) whether to discourage remittances by migrants. The inflow of migrant workers leads to a wage decline that harms citizen workers, while capitalists and oil rent earners benefit. When foreign exchange is remitted out of the economy, the real exchange rate depreciates. The remittance outflow benefits oil rent earners, while capitalists and workers lose. The autocratic ruler chooses a migration policy mix and an oil-rent redistribution scheme to maintain critical political support to avoid public rage. Our results explain differences in migration policies and redistribution schemes across Gulf countries. The model also offers predictions regarding the development of migration policies if these countries were to become more democratic.

This paper studies the influence of regional inequality within countries on internal conflicts. Regional inequalities are measured by the population-weighted coefficient of variation of regional GDP per capita. As the main innovation, I use a panel dataset of country-level regional inequalities, which covers 56 countries (835 subnational regions) between 1980 and 2009. I also consider a broader cross section dataset for the year 2005, which covers 110 countries (1569 subnational regions). Conflict is measured by the incidence of civil war (UCDP/PRIO data) and a risk measure of internal conflict (war, terrorism and riots) provided by the PRS Group’s International Country Risk Guide. Logit estimations are employed as well as OLS fixed effects panel regressions. I find that regional inequalities increase the risk of internal conflict.

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.

Does the lack of wealth constrain parents’ investments in the human capital of their descendants? We conduct a nearly 50-year follow-up of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of substantial wealth to families. We track descendants of participants in Georgia’s Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832, in which nearly every adult white male in the state took part. Winners received close to the median level of wealth—a large financial windfall orthogonal to participants’ underlying characteristics that might have also affected their children’s human capital. Although winners had slightly more children than did nonwinners, they did not send them to school more. Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of nonwinners, and winners’ grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than nonwinners’ grandchildren. We can reject effects implied by the cross-sectional gradient of child outcomes by paternal wealth. This suggests only a limited role for family financial resources in the formation of human capital in the next generations in this environment and a potentially more important role for other factors that persist through family lines.

This paper evaluates the effect of an anti-poverty program, Chile Solidario, during its first two years of operation. We find that the program tends to increases significantly their take-up of cash assistance programs and of social programs for housing and employment, and to improve education and health outcomes for participating households. There is no evidence that the participation to employment program translates into improved employment or income outcomes in the short term. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence of the key role that the psycho-social support had in enabling this change, by increasing awareness of social services in the community as well as households’ orientation towards the future., En este estudio se evalúa el efecto de un programa de lucha contra la pobreza, Chile Solidario, durante sus primeros dos años de funcionamiento. Encontramos que el programa tiende a aumentar significativamente su asimilación para los programas de asistencia en efectivo y los programas de vivienda sociales y empleo, así como a mejorar los resultados de la educación y la salud de los hogares participantes. No hay evidencia de que la participación en programas de empleo se traduzca en mejoras en el empleo o los ingresos en el corto plazo. Finalmente, la evidencia sugiere que el apoyo psicosocial ha tenido un rol fundamental en generar este cambio, tanto por medio de aumentar el conocimiento acerca de los servicios sociales en la comunidad como a través de la orientación de los hogares hacia el futuro.

In this paper I present a new database of bilateral migrant stocks and I provide new evidence on the determinants of international migration. The new Census-based data are obtained from National Statistical Offices of 24 OECD countries, and they cover the total stock of immigrants in each destination country for 1960-2000, including 188 countries of origin, sometimes in grouped categories. For each census, I keep grouped categories in a raw manner, without making imputations to specific origin countries. In the empirical analysis, I give an explicit treatment to these grouped categories. Results present strong evidence of heterogeneous effects of income gains on migration prospects depending on distance. For example, a 1000 $i ncrease in US income per capita increases the stock of Mexican immigrants in the country by a percentage 2.6 times larger than the percentage increase in the stock of Chinese (8 vs. 3.1 %).

In light of the shortage of healthcare professionals, many developing countries operate a defacto two-tiered system of healthcare provision, in which Community Health Workers (CHWs) supplement service provision by fully qualified physicians. CHWs are relatively inexpensive to train but can treat only a limited range of medical conditions. This paper explicitly models a two-tiered structure of healthcare provision and characterizes the optimal allocation of resources between training doctors and CHWs, and implications for population health outcomes. We analyze how medical migration alters resource allocation and population health outcomes, shifting resources towards training CHWs. In the model, migration stimulates health care provision at the lower end of the illness severity spectrum, improving health outcomes for those patients; sufferers of relatively severe medical conditions who can only be treated by doctors are made worse off. It is further shown that donor countries must be reimbursed by more than the training cost of emigrating physicians in order to restore aggregate population health to the pre-migration level, assuming that there are increasing marginal costs in involved in replacing migrating physicians.

Significant income gains from migrating from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral (source-country) policies facilitating labor emigration. However, their effectiveness is unknown. The authors conducted a large-scale randomized experiment in the Philippines testing the impact of unilaterally facilitating international labor migration. The most intensive treatment doubled the rate of job offers but had no identifiable effect on international labor migration. Even the highest overseas job-search rate that was induced (22 percent) falls far short of the share initially expressing interest in migrating (34 percent). The paper concludes that unilateral migration facilitation will at most induce a trickle, not a flood, of additional emigration.

By the mid-19th century, America was the most educated nation on Earth: significant financial investments in education were being undertaken and the majority of children voluntarily attended public schools. So why did states across America start introducing compulsory schooling laws at this time in history? We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence that states adopted compulsory schooling laws as a nation-building tool to instill civic values to the tens of millions of culturally diverse migrants who arrived during the ‘Age of Mass Migration’ between 1850 and 1914. We show the adoption of state level compulsory schooling laws occurred significantly earlier in states that hosted a subgroup of European migrants with lower exposure to civic values in their home countries. We then use cross-county data to show the same subgroup of European migrants had significantly lower demand for American common schooling pre-compulsion, and so would have been less exposed to the kinds of civic value or discipline instilled by the American education system had compulsory schooling not been passed. By studying the link between mass migration and the endogenous policy responses of American-born voters in receiving states, our analysis provides new micro-foundations for compulsory schooling laws, the legislative bedrock on which all future developments of the American schooling system were built.

Many severe health risks in developing countries could be substantially reduced with access to appropriate preventive measures. However, the associated costs are often high enough to restrict access among poor households, and free provision through public health campaigns is often not financially feasible. We describe findings from the first large-scale cluster randomized controlled trial in a developing country context that evaluates the uptake of a health-protecting technology, insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs), through micro-consumer loans, as compared to free distribution and control conditions. Numerous studies have shown that widespread, regular use of ITNs is one the most effective preventive measures against malaria. However, ownership rates remain very low in most malarious areas, including our study areas in rural Orissa (India). Despite the un-subsidized price, 52 percent of sample households purchased at least one ITN, leading to 16 percent of individuals using a treated net the previous night, relative to only 2 percent in control areas where nets were not offered for sale. However, the increase fell significantly short of the 47 percent previous-night usage rate achieved with free distribution. Most strikingly, we find that neither micro-loans nor free distribution led to improvements in malaria and anemia prevalence, measured using blood tests. We examine and rule out several plausible explanations for this latter finding. We conjecture that insufficient ITN coverage is the most likely explanation, and discuss implications for public health policy.

One in five Zambian children lives with an HIV/AIDS-infected adult. We estimate the effect that the availability of adult antiretroviral therapy (ART) has on the health of such children. Using a triple difference specification, we find that adult access to ART resulted in increased weight-for-age and decreased incidence of stunting among children younger than 60 months who resided with an infected father or other infected adult in an intact household. Because the increased availability of adult ART in sub-Saharan Africa has multigenerational effects, cost-effectiveness estimates restricted to direct recipients understate the economic benefit of the treatment.

Life in rural areas of developing countries is prone to many kinds of risk, such as illness or mortality of household members, crop or other income loss due to natural phenomena (weather, insect infestations, or fire, for example), and civil conflict. In addition to their contemporaneous effects, the effects of certain types of shocks may still be felt many years or even decades later. From a public policy standpoint, it is particularly important to identify shocks that have large long-run effects. Moreover, the mechanics underlying the persistence of shocks may be of con siderable interest. For example, a health shock may have a long-run effect simply because the health shock itself persists over time. Alternately, the health shock may not directly affect long run outcomes, but it could affect some other outcome?such as educational attainment?that helps determine long-run well-being. In this paper, we focus on shocks that occur at the very beginning of life. We ask how sensi tive long-run individual well-being is to environmental conditions around the time of birth. In particular, we examine the effect of weather shocks around the time of birth on the adult health, education, and socioeconomic outcomes of Indonesian women and men born between 1953 and 1974. In addition, we attempt to shed light on the intervening pathways connecting early-life rainfall to adult outcomes, illuminating the roles of health and educational attainment in deter mining adult socioeconomic status. This investigation has considerable data requirements. It necessitates information on weather shocks experienced by individuals several decades earlier, as well as detailed current informa tion on adult outcomes. We use information in the Indonesian Family Life Surveys (IFLS) on an individual's year and location of birth, and link each individual in that survey to locality specific rainfall data for their birth year. For individuals born in rural areas (on whom we focus), rainfall variation across space and time should generate corresponding variation in agricultural output and thus household income. To deal with measurement error in the rainfall data, we run instrumental variables regressions where variables for rainfall measured at slightly more distant rainfall stations serve as instruments for rainfall in the individual's birthplace and birth year. We examine the impact of early-life rainfall on a range of adult outcomes observed in 2000. We find that higher early-life rainfall leads to improved health, schooling, and socioeconomic status for women. Women with 20 percent higher rainfall (relative to normal local rainfall) in their year and location of birth are 3.8 percentage points less likely to self-report poor or very poor health. They attain 0.57 centimeters greater height, attain 0.22 more completed grades of

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.

Migrant networks play an important role in explaining the size and structure of migration flows. They affect the private costs and benefits of migration (assimilation channel) and lower legal entry barriers through family reunification programs (policy channel). This paper presents a micro-founded identification strategy allowing to disentangle the relative importance of these two channels. Our empirical analysis exploits US immigration data by metropolitan area and country of origin. We first find that the elasticity of migration flows to network size is around one. More interestingly, we show that the policy channel accounted at most for a quarter of this elasticity in the 1990s, and the magnitudes of the total network effect and the policy channel are greater for low-skilled migrants. Our results are strongly robust to sample selection, identification assumptions, and treatment for unobserved bilateral heterogeneity. Furthermore, the policy channel was stronger in the 1990s than in the 1980s, possibly reflecting the changes in the US family reunification policies. We conclude that the government capacity to curb the migration multiplier exists, but is limited.

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.