The interplay of employment uncertainty and education in explaining second births in Europe

Periods of high and persistent unemployment since the late 1980s as well as an upward trend in the share of temporary employment characterize recent labor market instability in Europe. This paper analyzes the associations between timing to a second birth and changing economic environment. In particular, it focuses in understanding what dimensions of economic uncertainty affect women with different educational background. First it employs time varying measures of aggregate market conditions for women in twelve European countries as well as micro-measures of each woman’s labor market history in a proportional hazard model of second births. Both individual and aggregate unemployment as well as temporary employment are coupled with later second births. Unemployment slows down childbearing plans, particularly for the least educated, whereas holding a very short contract deters the most educated. Second, I use the 2006 Spanish Fertility Survey to show how education and the economic conditions - provincial unemployment and share of temporary employment- faced by women as they enter the labor market in their early twenties are connected with their timing to second births.education, employment, Europe, second births, uncertainty

Age at Migration, Language and Fertility Patterns among Migrants to Canada

This paper explores the fertility decisions of Canadian immigrants using a 20 percent sample of the Canadian Census of Population for the years 1991 through 2006. We focus on those individuals that migrated as children and on their age at arrival to assess their process of assimilation in terms of fertility. Our analysis does not show any sharp discontinuity in fertility by age at migration as sometimes observed on education or labor market outcomes. Instead, there is an inverted U shape relationship between age of migration and immigrant fertility, with those migrating in their late teens having the highest fertility rates when compared to natives. This pattern appears among migrants from all origins – although their fertility levels differ. Results suggests that language acquisition is not a key mechanism through which age at immigration affects fertility – fertility behavior of immigrants with an official mother tongue also differs from that of natives. Rather fertility assimilation seems to be associated with education decisions. College graduates arriving to Canada anytime before adulthood behave as their native peers.age at migration, migration, fertility, language

The role of language in shaping international migration

Fluency in (or ease to quickly learn) the language of the destination country plays a key role in the transfer of human capital from the source country to another country and boosts the immigrant’s rate of success at the destination’s labor market. This suggests that the ability to learn and speak a foreign language might be an important factor in the migration decision. We use a novel dataset on immigration flows and stocks of foreigners in 30 OECD destination countries from 223 source countries for the years 1980–2009 and a wide range of linguistic indicators to study the role of language in shaping international migration. Specifically, we investigate how both linguistic distance and linguistic diversity, as a proxy for the “potential” ease to learn a new language and to adapt to a new context, affect migration. We find that migration rates increase with linguistic proximity and the result is robust to the inclusion of genetic distance as a proxy for cultural proximity and to the use of multiple measures of linguistic distance. Interestingly, linguistic proximity matters more for migrants moving into non-English speaking destinations than to English-speaking countries. The likely higher proficiency of the average migrant in English rather than in other languages may diminish the relevance of the linguistic proximity indicators to English speaking destinations. Finally, destinations that are linguistically more diverse and polarized attract fewer migrants than those with a single language; whereas more linguistic polarization at origin seems to act as a push factor.International migration, language.

The role of language in shaping international migration

Fluency in (or ease to quickly learn) the language of the destination country plays a key role in the transfer of human capital from the source country to another country and boosts the immigrant's rate of success at the destination's labor market. This suggests that the ability to learn and speak a foreign language might be an important factor in the migration decision. We use a novel dataset on immigration flows and stocks of foreigners in 30 OECD destination countries from 223 source countries for the years 1980-2009 and a wide range of linguistic indicators to study the role of language in shaping international migration. Specifically, we investigate how both linguistic distance and linguistic diversity, as a proxy for the "potential" ease to learn a new language and to adapt to a new context, affect migration. We find that migration rates increase with linguistic proximity and the result is robust to the inclusion of genetic distance as a proxy for cultural proximity and to the use of multiple measures of linguistic distance. Interestingly, linguistic proximity matters more for migrants moving into non-English speaking destinations than to English-speaking countries. The likely higher proficiency of the average migrant in English rather than in other languages may diminish the relevance of the linguistic proximity indicators to English speaking destinations. Finally, destinations that are linguistically more diverse and polarized attract fewer migrants than those with a single language; whereas more linguistic polarization at origin seems to act as a push factor.International migration, language

Are You Being Served?: Political Accountability and Quality of Government

This paper explores, both formally and empirically, the political accountability mechanisms that lie behind the varying levels of public corruption and of effective governance taking place across nations. The first section develops a principal-agent model in which good governance is a function of the extent to which citizens can hold political officials accountable for their actions. Although policy-makers may have strong incentives to appropriate parts of the citizens` income, well-designed institutions (those increasing both informational flows and elite competitiveness) boost political accountability and reduce the space left for the appropriation of rents. The following sections of the paper test the model. The presence of democratic mechanisms of control and an increasingly informed electorate, measured through the frequency of newspaper readership, explain considerably well the distribution of corrupt practices and governmental ineffectiveness in three types of data sets: a large cross-section of countries in the late 1990s for which an extensive battery of governance indicators has been recently developed by Kaufmann et al. (1999a); a panel data set for the period 1980-95 and about 100 nations on corruption and bureaucratic quality based on experts` rankings; and corruption data for the cross-section of US states in the period 1977-95.