General training under asymmetric information

One widely accepted conclusion in the human capital literature on training is that firms will finance only firm-specific training because it is non-transferable to other firms. Firms will not be willing to finance training in general (transferable) skills. In this paper it is argued that a recruiting firm will possess only limited knowledge of the training level in general skills acquired by workers in other firms. Hence a worker with transferable skills who changes employer can expect to suffer a cut in wages for a transition period while his level of productivity is being evaluated and recognized. Such a worker has no incentive to move as long as the present value of the loss in earnings is greater than the present value of the loss incurred in remaining with the training firm at a wage below the market-level for his skill. This result may have some important policy implications in countering the effects of market imperfections. It also suggests that training certification, in facilitating inter-firm mobility, discourages on-the-job training by firms.ICT Policy and Strategies,Labor Standards,Tertiary Education,Primary Education,Agricultural Research

Shared investment in general training : the role of information

The major premise of this paper is that potential recruiters do not possess much information on the extent and type of workers'on-the-job-training. Workers taken for trained might turn out to possess no, or very little, general training. Also, a worker recruited for a given job may possess the wrong type of general training. All this imposes substantial information-based costs on firms that recruit rather than train. These costs include opportunity costs, actual expenses and increased exposure to risk. As a result, a recruiting firm will offer lower wages and place a lower value on a recruited worker with general training than the firm that trained him.Tertiary Education,Primary Education,Labor Standards,Teaching and Learning,ICT Policy and Strategies

Property Rights, Theft, and Efficiency: The Biblical Waiver of Fines in the Case of Confessed Theft

In this paper we show that costs associated with infractions of property rights, such as theft, can be reduced by imposing lower penal-ties on individuals who admit to such infractions and make restitution. We find that the socially optimal penalty on a confessed thief may be zero (complete amnesty) or even negative – a person may be given a reward for confessing a theft. The benefits of amnesties were apparently recognized in ancient times and they constitute part of Biblical Law. Moreover, such amnesties have also been informally incorporated into modern legal systems, wherein leniency (a form of partial amnesty) is generally shown to individuals who confess their infractions.

Macroeconomic Instability, Migration, and the Option Value of Education

We explore the relation between variability in the rate of return to human capital and investment in education in the context of migration. Specifically, we show that if migration is a possibility, such variability in the rate of return to human capital can induce residents of developing countries to make greater investments in education. Moreover, providing that education is relatively costly, variability in the return to human capital may increase the average level of education in a developing economy even after expected migration is netted out. Finally, our findings are shown to have explanatory power in relation to education and migratory patterns of minorities.Macroeconomic instability, Income volatility, Migration, Human capital, Ethnic discrimination, Ethnic conflicts, Minorities.

Labor Migration and Risk Aversion in Less Developed Countries

In this paper we question the pioneering work of Todaro, which states that rural-to-urban labor migration in less developed countries (LDCs) is an individual response to a higher urban expected income. We demonstrate that rural-to-urban labor migration is perfectly rational even if urban expected income is lower than rural income. We achieve this under a set of fairly stringent conditions: an individual decision-making entity, a one-period planning horizon, and global risk aversion. We obtain the result that a small chance of reaping a high reward is sufficient to trigger rural-to-urban labor migration

Arbitrage, Clientele Effects, and the Term Structure of Interest Rates

This paper derives a new and intuitive estimation procedure for the term structure under potential tax arbitrage. No a priori assumptions regarding the equality of the prices and present values of bonds are made. The data are employed to determine whether this equality holds, and an appropriate estimator is thereby endogenously derived. The suggested estimator is based on the optimizing behavior of an investor in a market with frictions, and emerges directly from the solution of the dual of the no-arbitrage optimization problem. In addition, the proposed estimator benefits from being both theoretically sound and straightforward to apply