Can We Identify Balassa-Samuelson Effects with Measures of Product Variety?

The Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis - i.e. that real exchange rates between each pair of countries increase with the tradables sector productivities ratio between these countries, and decrease with their non-tradables sector productivities ratio - has been one of the most prominent frameworks in open economy macroeconomics for more than forty years. However, empirical studies have often been unable to confirm it. We argue that this might at least in part be due to measurement errors leading to downward-biased estimates. We test the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis with innovative trade-based vari-ety measures to differentiate between tradables and non-tradables sector productivities that do not suffer from such errors-in-variables. Using a pairwise regression approach, we find stable and very robust Balassa-Samuelson effects over all our specifications

Migration and Remittances in Kazakhstan: First Evidence from a Household Survey

Internal migration flows in Kazakhstan are of high social and political relevance but political and public attention has primarily been devoted to external movements. This paper presents the main descriptive results of a new household survey on migration and remittances in Kazakhstan which was conducted in four cities (Almaty, Astana, Karaganda and Pavlodar) between October and December 2010. It summarizes the survey's methodology, gives an overview over the basic characteristics of respondents, illustrates migration experiences on the individual and the household level and compares migrants and non-migrants. Furthermore, the prevalence of remittances and attitudes towards migration are discussed

The Penn Effect and Transition: The New EU Member States in International Perspective

Recent panel studies have found relatively high point estimates for the elasticity of ag-gregate price measures with respect to productivity in (former) transition economies, while other studies report price-productivity elasticity estimates to depend positively on average productivity in the sample. We aim to reconcile both results by putting com-parative price developments of transition economies in an international perspective. We argue that estimating simple price-productivity relationships without the inclusion of other real factors connected to reform effort might severely bias estimates for CEEC economies. Our results imply that, when controlling for reform effort and therefore avoiding this endogeneity problem, the price-productivity-elasticity for CEEC econo-mies was not different from that of non-transition economies during the first 15 years of transition

Robust Estimation of Wage Dispersion with Censored Data: An Application to Occupational Earnings Risk and Risk Attitudes

We present a semiparametric method to estimate group-level dispersion, which is particularly effective in the presence of censored data. We apply this procedure to obtain measures of occupation-specific wage dispersion using top-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment Sample (IABS). We then relate these robust measures of earnings risk to the risk attitudes of individuals working in these occupations. We find that willingness to take risk is positively correlated with the wage dispersion of an individual's occupation

Minimum wages and poverty

International audienc

Can the Minimum Wage Reduce Poverty? Evidence from Urban China

International audienc

Minimum wages and poverty

International audienc

Are Wages Equal Across Sectors of Production? A Panel Data Analysis for Tradable and Non-Tradable Goods

The assumption that national labor markets are homogenous across tradable and non-tradable goods is common in multisector (open-economy) macro models and crucial for the prominent Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis. This study tests it with a novel method to distinguish the tradable and non-tradable sectors grounded in economic theory, modern empirical methods and a large and detailed macro data set. It finds that both the internal relationship between productivity and wages in the tradable and non-tradable sectors postulated by the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis and its external transmission mechanism are rejected