Labour Force Participation and Employment of Humanitarian Migrants: Evidence from the Building a New Life in Australia Longitudinal Data

This study uses the longitudinal data from the Building a New Life in Australia survey to examine the relationships between human capital and labour market participation and employment status among recently arrived/approved humanitarian migrants. It includes attention to the heterogeneity of labour force participation and employment status across genders and also migration pathways. We find that the likelihood of participating in the labour force is higher for those who had preimmigration paid job experience, completed study/job training and have job searching knowledge/skills in Australia and possess higher proficiency in spoken English. We find that the chance of getting a paid job is negatively related to having better pre-immigration education, but it is positively related to having unpaid work experience and job searching skills in Australia, and better health

Random or Referral Hiring: When Social Connections Matter

This study investigates the existence of hiring criteria associated with the degree of social connections between skill and low-skill workers. We provide evidence about to what extent managers rely on their social connections in recruiting low-skill workers rather than on random matching. As one unique feature we follow an approach for a posted wage setting that reflects the main features of the Spanish labor market. By working with sub-samples of high and low-skill workers we are able to assess that the recruitment of low-skill immigrants quite often follows a referral strategy and we identify interesting irregularities across the ethnic groups. As a common feature, referral hiring is usually influences by the ethnicity of the manager and the relative proportion of immigrants within the firm. Under these perspectives, our study outlines new insights to evaluate the future perspectives of the Spanish labor market

Teaching by example and induced beliefs in a model of cultural transmission

We augment standard models of cultural transmission with an explicit account of social learning, grounded in the information transmission literature. Youngsters observe the behavioral trait of a role model and form beliefs about the desirability of that trait. Adults have better information about each trait and have a paternalistic attitude toward their children. This makes them reluctant to adopt myopic behavior to avoid setting a negative example to their children. This signaling distortion increases in the influence parents have over their offspring. We extend the model to allow parental influence to depend on the population frequency of each trait and show that cultural complementarity does not imply convergence to a homogeneous population. We find empirical support for a positive relationship between parental influence and propensity to exert self-restraint by looking at alcohol and tobacco consumption

Network Economics and the Environment: Insights and Perspectives

Local interactions and network structures appear to be a prominent feature of many environmental problems. This paper discusses a wide range of issues and potential areas of application, including the role of relational networks in the pattern of adoption of green technologies, common pool resource problems characterized by a multiplicity of sources, the role of social networks in multi-level environmental governance, infrastructural networks in the access to and use of natural resources such as oil and natural gas, the use of networks to describe the internal structure of inter-country relations in international agreements, and the formation of bilateral "links" in the process of building up an environmental coalition. For each of these areas, we examine why and how network economics would be an effective conceptual and analytical tool, and discuss the main insights that we can foresee

Determinants of Integration and Its Impact on the Economic Success of Immigrants: A Case Study of the Turkish Community in Berlin

Using a new data on 590 Turkish households in Berlin, we investigate the determinants and impact of integration on economic performance. We find that usual suspects such as time spent in Germany and education have positive impact, while networks have no impact on integration. There is strong evidence that political integration and the degree of full integration promote income. Using endogenous switching regression models, we show that local familial networks increase the income of unintegrated migrant groups only, while transnational networks decrease it. We also find that education is more welfare improving for integrated than non-integrated immigrants

Social Network Capital, Economic Mobility and Poverty Traps

The paper explores the role social network capital might play in facilitating poor agents’ escape from poverty traps. We model endogenous network formation among households heterogeneously endowed with both traditional and social network capital who make investment and technology choices over time in the absence of financial markets and faced with multiple production technologies featuring different fixed costs and returns. We show that social network capital can serve as either a complement to or a substitute for productive assets in facilitating some poor households’ escape from poverty. However, the voluntary nature of costly social network formation also creates both involuntary and voluntary exclusionary mechanisms that impede some poor households’ efforts to exit poverty. The ameliorative potential of social networks therefore depends fundamentally on the underlying wealth distribution in the economy. In some settings, targeted public transfers to the poor can crowd-in private resources by inducing new social links that the poor can exploit to escape from poverty