Immigrant Heterogeneity and the Earnings Distribution in the United Kingdom and United States: New Evidence from a Panel Data Quantile Regression Analysis

In this paper we use a relatively new panel data quantile regression technique to examine native-immigrant earnings differentials 1) throughout the conditional wage distribution, and 2) controlling for individual heterogeneity. No previous papers have simultaneously considered these factors. We focus on both women and men, using longitudinal data from the PSID and the BHPS. We show that country of origin, country of residence, and gender are all important deter- minants of the earnings differential. For instance, a large wage penalty occurs in the U.S. among female immigrants from non-English speaking countries, and the penalty is most negative among the lowest (conditional) wages. On the other hand, women in Britain experience hardly any immigrant-native wage differential. We find evidence suggesting that immigrant men in the U.S. and the U.K. earn lower wages, but the most significant results are found for British workers emigrating from non-English speaking countries. The various differentials we report in this paper reveal the value of combining quantile regression with controls for individual heterogeneity in better understanding immigrant wage effects

Immigrant Heterogeneity and the Earnings Distribution in the United Kingdom and United States: New Evidence from a Panel Data Quantile Regression Analysis

In this paper we use a relatively new panel data quantile regression technique to examine native-immigrant earnings differentials 1) throughout the conditional wage distribution, and 2) controlling for individual heterogeneity. No previous papers have simultaneously considered these factors. We focus on both women and men, using longitudinal data from the PSID and the BHPS. We show that country of origin, country of residence, and gender are all important determinants of the earnings differential. For instance, a large wage penalty occurs in the U.S. among female immigrants from non-English speaking countries, and the penalty is most negative among the lowest (conditional) wages. On the other hand, women in Britain experience hardly any immigrant-native wage differential. We find evidence suggesting that immigrant men in the U.S. and the U.K. earn lower wages, but the most significant results are found for British workers emigrating from non-English speaking countries. The various differentials we report in this paper reveal the value of combining quantile regression with controls for individual heterogeneity in better understanding immigrant wage effects.immigrants, earnings, quantile regression, panel data

Collective bargaining in developing countries

Because theoretical arguments differ on the economic impact of collective bargaining agreements in developing countries, empirical studies are needed to provide greater clarity. Recent empirical studies for some Latin American countries have examined whether industry- or firm-level collective bargaining is more advantageous for productivity growth. Although differences in labor market institutions and in coverage of collective bargaining agreements limit the generalizability of the findings, studies suggest that work rules may raise productivity when negotiated at the firm level but may sometimes lower productivity when negotiated at the industry level

The Political Economy of Heterogeneous Development: Quartile Effects of Income and Education

Does development lead to the establishment of more democratic institutions? Over the past 50 years, the countries have illustratred two very distinct stages of political development—authoritarian states with low levels of freedom on one side and democracies with liberal institutions on the other. We develop a new empirical strategy that allows for the first time to estimate the effects of development as well as changing unobserved country effects in driving democracy at these different stages of political development. We find income and education have the least effect on democracy when authoritarian regimes are consolidated and only changing country effects can lead to political development. Ironically, it is in highly democratic and wealthy nations that income and education start to play a role; however greater wealth and better educated citizenry can both help and hurt democracy depending again on what the country’s institutional legacies are. Far from accepting the notion that much of the developing world is cursed by unchanging and poor long-run institutions, policy-makers should take note that with democratization we also see changing country-specific factors that in turn condition the difference income and education can make for democracy.democracy, economic development, quantile regression

Estimating and testing a quantile regression model with interactive effects

This paper proposes a quantile regression estimator for a panel data model with interactive effects potentially correlated with the independent variables. We provide conditions under which the slope parameter estimator is asymptotically Gaussian. Monte Carlo studies are carried out to investigate the finite sample performance of the proposed method in comparison with other candidate methods. We discuss an approach to testing the model specification against a competing fixed effects specification. The paper presents an empirical application of the method to study the effect of class size and class composition on educational attainment. The findings show that (i) a change in the gender composition of a class impacts differently low- and high-performing students; (ii) while smaller classes are beneficial for low performers, larger classes are beneficial for high performers; (iii) reductions in class size do not seem to impact mean and median student performance; (iv) the fixed effects specification is rejected in favor of the interactive effects specification

The Effect of Information on the Bidding and Survival of Entrants in Procurement Auctions

In government procurement auctions of construction contracts, entrants are typically less informed and bid more aggressively than incumbent firms. This bidding behavior makes them more susceptible to losses a¤ecting their prospect of survival. In April of 2000, the Oklahoma Department of Transportation started releasing the internal cost estimates to complete highway construction projects. Using newly developed quantile regression approaches, this paper examines the impact of the policy change on aggressive entrants. First, we find that the information release eliminates the bidding differential between entrants and incumbents attributed to informational asymmetries. Second, we argue that the policy change a¤ects the prospects of survival of entrants in the market. We find that those who used to exit the market relatively soon are now staying 37 percent longer, while at the median level bidding duration increased by roughly 68 percent. The policy has the potential to encourage entry in government procurement auctions and thus increase competition.Entry; Survival; Information Release; Procurement Auctions

Wild Bootstrap Inference for Penalized Quantile Regression for Longitudinal Data

Existing work on penalized quantile regression for longitudinal data has been focused almost exclusively on point estimation. In this work, we investigate statistical inference. We first show that the pairs bootstrap that samples cross-sectional units with replacement does not approximate well the limiting distribution of the penalized estimator. We then propose a wild residual bootstrap procedure and show that it is asymptotically valid for approximating the distribution of the penalized estimator. The new method is easy to implement and uses weight distributions that are standard in the literature. Simulation studies are carried out to investigate the small sample behavior of the proposed approach in comparison with existing procedures. Finally, we illustrate the new approach using U.S. Census data to estimate a high-dimensional model that includes more than eighty thousand parameters.Comment: 35 pages, 6 page appendix, 3 figures, 3 table

Penalized Quantile Regression with Semiparametric Correlated Effects: Applications with Heterogeneous Preferences

This paper proposes new ℓ1-penalized quantile regression estimators for panel data, which explicitly allows for individual heterogeneity associated with covariates. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations to assess the small sample performance of the new estimators and provide comparisons of new and existing penalized estimators in terms of quadratic loss. We apply the techniques to two empirical studies. First, the new method is applied to the estimation of labor supply elasticities and we find evidence that positive substitution effects dominate negative wealth effects at the middle of the conditional distribution of hours. The overall effect tends to be larger at the lower tail, which suggests that changes in taxes have different effects across the response distribution. Second, we estimate consumer preferences for nutrients from a demand model using a large scanner dataset of household food purchases. We show that preferences for nutrients vary across the conditional distribution of expenditure and across genders, and emphasize the importance of fully capturing consumer heterogeneity in demand modeling. Both applications highlight the importance of estimating individual heterogeneity when designing economic policy

Distributional Effects of Welfare Reform Experiments: A Panel Quantile Regression Examination

In an influential article, Bitler, Gelbach and Hoynes (American Economic Re- view, 2006; 96, 988-1012) illustrate the importance of estimating heterogeneous impacts of welfare reform experiments. They find that the mean treatment effect offers an uninfor- mative summary of opposing effects, while the treatment effects are significantly different across quantiles. We replicate their results and evaluate the robustness of their findings to accounting for individual-specific heterogeneity possibly associated with welfare program participation. We find results that are in general similar to Bitler’s et al. findings, although the interpretation of labor supply effects in the upper tail is revised. We find no evidence of behavioral induced participation

Disadvantaged business enterprise goals in government procurement contracting: an analysis of bidding behavior and costs

Programs that encourage the participation of disadvantaged business enterprises (DBE) as subcontractors have been a part of government procurement auctions for over three decades. In this paper, we examine the impact of a program that requires prime contractors to subcontract out a portion of a highway procurement project to DBE firms. We study how DBE subcontracting requirements affect bidding behavior in federally funded projects. Within a symmetric independent private value framework, we use the equilibrium bidding function to obtain the cost distribution of firms undertaking projects either with or without subcontracting goals. We then use nonparametric estimation methodsto uncover and compare the cost of firms bidding on a class of asphalt projects related to surface treatment in Texas. The analysis shows little differences in the cost structure between auctions that have subcontracting goals and those that do not.Auctions ; Government purchasing