Sale of visas: a smuggler's final song?

Is there a way of eliminating human smuggling? We set up a model to simultaneously determine the provision of human smuggling services and the demand from would-be migrants. A visa-selling policy may be successful at eliminating smugglers by eroding their profits but it also increases immigration. In contrast, repression decreases migration but fuels cartelized smugglers. To overcome this trade-off we show that legalisation through selling visas in combination with repression can be used to eliminate human smuggling while controlling migration flows. Simulations of the policy highlight the complementarities between repression and selling visas and call into question current policies

Opera CD Project

The library has a significant amount of materials on-site. For pleasure or for simply completing assigned work, our library has the resources to help students and staff. The library continually has to keep updating its equipment and technical materials like CDs and IPADS. Otherwise, the technology would be outdated and less useful, if useful at all. [excerpt

Guest Workers in the Underground Economy

Guest-worker programs have been providing rapidly growing economies with millions of temporary foreign workers over the last couple of decades. With the duration of stay strictly limited by program rules in most of the host countries and wages paid to guest workers often set at sub-market levels, many of the migrants choose to overstay and seek employment in the underground economy. This paper develops a general-equilibrium model that relates the flow of guest workers transiting to the underground economy to the rules of the program, enforcement measures of the host country and market conditions facing migrants at home and abroad

Food and cash transfers: evidence from Colombia

We study food Engel curves among the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer programme in Colombia. After controlling for the endogeneity of total expenditure and for the (unobserved) variability of prices across villages, the best fit is provided by a log-linear specification. Our estimates imply that an increase in total expenditure by 10% would lead to a decrease of 1% in the share of food. However, quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of the programme on total and food consumption show that the share of food increases, suggesting that the programme has more complex impacts than increasing household income. In particular, our results are not inconsistent with the hypothesis that the programme, targeted to women, could increase their bargaining power and induce a more than proportional increase in food consumption

Asymmetry of Information within Family Networks

This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of mis-perception of living standards among households within the same network. We contrast altruism, pressure, exchange and risk sharing as motives to transfer in simple models with asymmetric information. Testing the model predictions in the data uncovers the active role played by recipients of transfers. Our findings suggest that recipients set the terms of the transfers, either by exerting pressure on donors or because they hold substantial bargaining power in their exchange relationships

First Blog Ever

I may be new at this whole blogging thing, but I am willing to give it a shot. My name is Ilana Mesnard and I am this semesters Fortenbaugh Intern in Music. When I applied, I knew I wanted to help out in the library and expand its music collection. Since I started my intern work in September, I\u27ve accomplished all that and more. In this time, I have learned many of the jobs of a music librarian. I\u27ve been asked to make programs for the Notes at Noon concerts, research obscure music, teach students library tools and more. I\u27ll be sure to share all the cool things I\u27ve been doing this semester so keep reading! [excerpt

Ethnic parity in labour market outcomes for benefit claimants

A significant gap exists in the UK between the employment rate for Ethnic Minorities and that for Whites. From a policy perspective, it is important to know whether this gap is due to differences in the characteristics of White and Ethnic Minority groups (which reduce the employability of Ethnic Minority groups relative to Whites) or whether it results from some form of discriminatory behaviour in the labour market. In this paper, we use administrative data to estimate ethnic differences in employment and benefit receipt amongst individuals who began claiming a Jobcentre Plus benefit in 2003. In contrast to much of the previous UK literature, we use a number of different quantitative techniques to estimate this gap, and show that in a lot of cases the estimates obtained are very sensitive to the techniques used. We argue that for the questions we are interested in and the data we have, propensity score matching methods are the most robust approach to estimating ethnic parity. We compare this preferred approach with estimates derived using alternative approaches commonly used in the literature (generally regression-based techniques) to determine the extent to which more straightforward methods are able to replicate those produced by matching. In many cases, it turns out not to be possible to calculate satisfactory quantitative estimates even with matching techniques: the characteristics of Whites and Ethnic Minorities are simply too different before the Jobcentre Plus intervention to reliably estimate the parameters of interest. Moreover, for a number of the groups, results seem to be very sensitive to the methodology used. This calls into question previous results based on simple regression techniques, which are likely to hide the fact that observationally different ethnic groups are de facto being compared on the basis of parametric extrapolations. Two groups for which it was possible to calculate reasonably reliable results are incapacity benefit (IB) and income support (IS). For these groups we find that large and significant raw penalties almost always disappear once we appropriately control for pre-inflow background and labour market characteristics. There is also a good degree of consistency across methodologies

Health & Wellness Page

Where is health on your priority list? Good health is crucial for all people, but especially for musicians (or athletes) who need their bodies in top performance shape. Musicians in the conservatory need to be aware of how to stay healthy. The purposes of the Health and Wellness Page are to promote good health, and to create awareness of reliable resources on healthy lifestyle choices as musicians. [excerpt