Willingness to Assimilate and Ethnicity

A model is set up whereby migrants must choose a level of social traits and consumption of ethnic goods. We deal with the relationship between the consumption of ethnic goods, the choice of social traits, wages and the employment of migrants. As the consumption level of ethnic goods increases, the migrants become ever more different from the local population and less assimilated. We consider the effect that being part, or not being part, of the labor force has on the consumption of ethnic goods, comparing those who are not part of the labor force with the employed and the level of ethnic goods each uses and their chances of assimilation in the host country.Social benefits, Ethnic goods, Social trait, Assimilation, Unemployment.

Extremism within the family

This paper considers an economic analysis of intergenerational transition of ethnic and social trait. We consider the level of social traits chosen by parents and its effect on their children's choice of ethnic and social traits when reaching adulthood. We develop a theory that suggests that parents will chose extreme ethnic and social traits in order to increase the cost that their children will pay if they wish to deviate from their parent's "ideal". The extreme choice of the ethnic social traits of parents has an effect on the segregation of minorities and migrants.intergenerational transition, ethnic trait, social trait, minorities, migrants

Migration and Culture

Culture is not new to the study of migration. It has lurked beneath the surface for some time, occasionally protruding openly into the discussion, usually under some pseudonym. The authors bring culture into the open. They are concerned with how culture manifests itself in the migration process for three groups of actors: the migrants, those remaining in the sending areas, and people already living in the recipient locations. The topics vary widely. What unites the authors is an understanding that though actors behave differently, within a group there are economically important shared beliefs (customs, values, attitudes, etc.), which we commonly refer to as culture. Culture and identify play a central role in our understanding of migration as an economic phenomenon; but what about them matters? Properly, we should be looking at the determinants of identity and the determinants of culture (prices and incomes, broadly defined). But this is not what is done. Usually identity and culture appear in economics articles as a black box. Here we try to begin to break open the black box.

A Political Economy of the Immigrant Assimilation: Internal Dynamics

Within immigrant society different groups wish to help the migrants in different ways - immigrant societies are multi-layered and multi-dimensional. We examine the situation where there exists a foundation that has resources and that wishes to help the migrants. To do so they need migrant groups to invest effort in helping their country-folk. Migrant groups compete against one another by helping their country-folk and to win grants from the foundation. We develop a model that considers how such a competition affects the resources invested by the groups' supporters and how beneficial it is to immigrants. We consider two alternative rewards systems for supporters - absolute and relative ranking - in achieving their goals.

The Impact of Worker Effort on Public Sentiment Towards Temporary Migrants

Temporary and circular migration programs have been devised by many destination countries and supported by the European Commission as a policy to reduce welfare and social costs of immigration in destination countries. In this paper we present an additional reason for proposing temporary migration policies based on the characteristics of the foreign labor-effort supply. The level of effort exerted by migrants, which decreases over their duration in the host country, positively affects production, real wages and capital owners' profits. We show that the acceptance of job offers by migrants result in the displacement in employment of national workers. However it increases the workers' exertion, decreases prices and thus can counter anti-immigrant voter sentiment. Therefore, the favorable sentiment of the capital owners and the local population towards migrants may rise when temporary migration policies are adopted.migration, exertion of effort, contracted temporary migration

Multi-Generation Model of Immigrant Earnings: Theory and Application

The literature, starting with Chiswick (1977, 1978) to Gang and Zimmermann (2000), more recently, focuses on the economic achievements and performance of first- and second-generation migrants. This paper presents a three-generation migrant analysis, comparing relative economic performance of various migrant generations to one another and to the native population. We developed a theoretical model, which was then explored empirically using data from the 1995 Israeli Census. In both the theoretical and empirical analyses, the curve describing intergenerational immigrant earnings mobility is inversely U-shaped. The second generation earns relatively more than the first and third generations, while the third generation earns less than the second, but more than the first. Thus, assimilation of the third generation into the local population is far from clear.Intergenerational earnings mobility, migration, labor market performance.

Governing Interest Groups and Rent Dissipation

In a contest group - specific public goods we consider the effect that managing an interest group has on the rent dissipation and the total expected payoffs of the contest. While in the first group, there is a central planner determining its members’ expenditure in the contest, in the second group there are two different possibilities: either all the members are governed by a central planner or they aren’t. We consider both types of contests: an all pay auction and a Logit contest success function. We show that while governing an interest group decreases free-riding, it may as well decrease the rent dissipation; at the same time the expected payoffs from the groups may also decrease.

Effort and Performance in Public-Policy Contests

Government intervention often gives rise to contests in which the possible ‘prizes’ are determined by the existing status-quo and some new public- policy proposal . In this paper we study the general class of such two-player public-policy contests and examine the effect of a change in the proposed policy, a change that may affect the payoffs of the two contestants, on their effort and performance. We extend the existing comparative statics studies that focus on the effect of changes either in the value of the prize in symmetric contests or in one of the contestants’ valuation of the prize in asymmetric contests. Our results hinge on the relationship between the strategic own-stake (“income”) effect and the strategic rival’s-stake (“substitution”) effect. This relationship is determined by three types of ability and stakes asymmetry between the contestants. In particular, we specify the asymmetry condition under which a more restrained government intervention that reduces the contestants’ prizes has the perverse effect of increasing their aggregate lobbying efforts.public-policy contests, policy reforms, lobbying efforts, strategic own-stake effect, strategic rival’s-stake (“substitution”) effect.

Interactions Between Local and Migrant Workers at the Workplace

In this paper we consider the interaction between local workers and migrants in the production process of a firm. Both local workers and migrants can invest effort in assimilation activities in order to increase the assimilation of the migrants into the firm and so by increase their interaction and production activities. We consider the effect, the relative size (in the firm) of each group and the cost of activities, has on the assimilation process of the migrants.Assimilation; Contracts; Ethnicity; Market Structure; Networks; Harassment