The Regional Economic Effects of Immigration

The effects of immigration on the host country are pervasive and long-term. It is not surprising that they have been extensively analysed, not least the economic effects which have been the subject of both theoretical and empirical research. While some of the empirical research has had a regional dimension, this has often been incidental to the analysis of the labour market – the effects of immigration on wages and employment prospects of the native-born depend on the regional migration response. In contrast, there has been little analysis of the general effects of immigration on regional economies per se. This paper contributes to the filling of this gap by constructing a small two-region computable general-equilibrium (CGE) model which is used to analyse the effects of various immigration shocks on regional variables such as output, employment, the labour force, unemployment, wages and welfare. We simulate the effects of different types of immigration shocks and distinguish between short-run and long-run effects. We also consider the effectiveness of government intervention designed to alleviate the adverse regional effects of immigration including the possibility that regional governments behave in a welfare-maximising way.immigration, regional, labour market

An Analysis of the Effects of Fiscal Equalisation in a Two-Region Simulation Model

This paper is concerned primarily with the economic and welfare consequences of federal redistributive grants. We use a model which has two regions, each with households, firms and regional governments as well as a federal government. The households, firms and regional governments are all optimizers – households maximize utility, firms maximize profits and we assume that regional governments are empire-builders in that they choose their expenditure and tax levels so as to maximise total expenditure – the size of their empire. Labour is free to move between regions in response to utility differences and does so until such differences have been eliminated. Inter-regional migration, interregional trade flows and federal government redistribution are the main sources of interconnectedness between the two regions. The model is linearised in log-differences and simulated using a calibration based on Australian state-level data. We find that the welfare effect of intergovernmental transfers is trivial but that all other variables of interest change substantially – consumption, employment, prices, taxes, wages, output and government expenditure. Finally, the signs of the effects of a federal transfer are not affected by the empire-building behaviour of regional governments although the magnitude of the effects is generally dampened.

On the concepts of radial and angular kinetic energies

We consider a general central-field system in D dimensions and show that the division of the kinetic energy into radial and angular parts proceeds differently in the wavefunction picture and the Weyl-Wigner phase-space picture. Thus, the radial and angular kinetic energies are different quantities in the two pictures, containing different physical information, but the relation between them is well defined. We discuss this relation and illustrate its nature by examples referring to a free particle and to a ground-state hydrogen atom.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev.

The Moyal-Lie Theory of Phase Space Quantum Mechanics

A Lie algebraic approach to the unitary transformations in Weyl quantization is discussed. This approach, being formally equivalent to the $\star$-quantization, is an extension of the classical Poisson-Lie formalism which can be used as an efficient tool in the quantum phase space transformation theory.Comment: 15 pages, no figures, to appear in J. Phys. A (2001

Instruments and channels in quantum information theory

While a positive operator valued measure gives the probabilities in a quantum measurement, an instrument gives both the probabilities and the a posteriori states. By interpreting the instrument as a quantum channel and by using the typical inequalities for the quantum and classical relative entropies, many bounds on the classical information extracted in a quantum measurement, of the type of Holevo's bound, are obtained in a unified manner.Comment: 12 pages, revtex

Wigner Trajectory Characteristics in Phase Space and Field Theory

Exact characteristic trajectories are specified for the time-propagating Wigner phase-space distribution function. They are especially simple---indeed, classical---for the quantized simple harmonic oscillator, which serves as the underpinning of the field theoretic Wigner functional formulation introduced. Scalar field theory is thus reformulated in terms of distributions in field phase space. Applications to duality transformations in field theory are discussed.Comment: 9 pages, LaTex2