External and internal determinants of development

As Rodrik, Subramanian, and Trebbi (2004) point out, factors that affect economic development can be classified using a two-tier approach. Based on a standard production function, inputs such as labor and physical and human capital directly affect per capita income. Much of the empirical cross-country growth literature has focused on these covariates. But the factors themselves are the product of deeper and more fundamental determinants and, thus, are at best proximate factors of economic development. The deeper determinants fall into two broad categories: internal and external. Among the former, institutions and geography have received the most attention, while international trade has been the focus of the latter. The main purpose of this paper is to add an external factor, namely measures of migration, to the existing geography-institutions-trade setup and to evaluate its contribution to the observed differences in per capita income across countries.Emigration and immigration ; International trade ; Economic development ; Developing countries ; Geography

Politics and Trade Policy: An Empirical Investigation

In this paper we examine the empirical relevance of three prominent endogenous protection models. Is protection for sale, or do altruistic policy makers worry about political support? We find strong evidence that protection is indeed "for sale." The important new result is, however, that not only the existence of lobbies matters, but also the relative size of the sectoral pro and anti protection contributions. All variables of both the Influence Driven (Grossman and Helpman, 1994) and the Tariff Function (Findlay and Wellisz, 1982) models are significant at the one percent level. Novel is our application of a single, unified theoretical framework to take strict interpretations of the three theoretical models to the data. We thus extend the previous tests of the Influence Driven approach by comparing its performance to well specified alternatives. Using J tests to compare the power of the models directly, we find significant misspecification in the Political Support Function approach. We cannot reject the null hypothesis of correct specification of the Influence Driven model and find evidence of some misspecification in the Tariff Function model.Endogenous protection, lobbying, political economy of tariffs

Trade, Wages, and Specific Factors

In this paper, we use a multi-sector specific factors model with sector-specific capital and two mobile factors, production and non-production labor, to examine the effects of globalization on the skill premium in U.S.\ manufacturing industries. A key feature of this model is that factor-price insensitivity does not hold, and thus endowment changes and factor-specific technological change affect relative factor returns, and hence the skill premium. Using this model and data for the U.S. manufacturing sector from 1958-94, we calculate changes in the skill premium and then carry out a decomposition to identify the changes caused by globalization, technological progress, and endowment changes. We find the model to be an accurate predictor of both the direction and magnitude of changes in the skill premium. The decomposition reveals that globalization effects, working through product price changes, were small in magnitude and caused the skill premium to decline during the '70s and '80s. In contrast, changes in capital endowments had a strong positive effect on the skill premium throughout the entire sample period. Sector specific and production labor specific technological change also had a positive impact on the premium, while non-production labor specific technological change increased the premium in all decades. Finally, changes in labor endowments caused a decline in the premium during all three decades.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) Development in Nigeria: Determining Task Technology Fit (TTF) Impact on Faculty Usage, Satisfaction and Performance

Open educational resources (OER) are gaining grounds globally. However, different regions face different obstacles to OER adoption, policies and experiences. Unfortunately, Africa has continued to trail behind the rest of the world in the adoption of OERs. A number of factors have been adduced from literature ranging from lack of awareness; absence of policies, infrastructural deficits among others with total absence of literature on the fit of the existing technologies being used and how these technologies fit affects utilization, satisfaction and performance impacts. This work adopted the TUSPEM model as a theoretical framework to assess the causal relationship among five constructs of Task Technology Fit, social norms, utilization, satisfaction and performance impacts.  Through a quantitative research approach, snowballing sampling was adopted to identify 123 respondents from a Nigerian University. Smart PLS was used to analyze the dataset. Although the results had strong support for relationships between TTF, satisfaction, the result showed a stronger relationship from post usage satisfaction to performance than TTF to performance. It implies that in a voluntary usage environment, TTF and user satisfaction is critical if performance using any information system is to be achieved.

IST Austria Thesis

In this thesis we study persistence of multi-covers of Euclidean balls and the geometric structures underlying their computation, in particular Delaunay mosaics and Voronoi tessellations. The k-fold cover for some discrete input point set consists of the space where at least k balls of radius r around the input points overlap. Persistence is a notion that captures, in some sense, the topology of the shape underlying the input. While persistence is usually computed for the union of balls, the k-fold cover is of interest as it captures local density, and thus might approximate the shape of the input better if the input data is noisy. To compute persistence of these k-fold covers, we need a discretization that is provided by higher-order Delaunay mosaics. We present and implement a simple and efficient algorithm for the computation of higher-order Delaunay mosaics, and use it to give experimental results for their combinatorial properties. The algorithm makes use of a new geometric structure, the rhomboid tiling. It contains the higher-order Delaunay mosaics as slices, and by introducing a filtration function on the tiling, we also obtain higher-order α-shapes as slices. These allow us to compute persistence of the multi-covers for varying radius r; the computation for varying k is less straight-foward and involves the rhomboid tiling directly. We apply our algorithms to experimental sphere packings to shed light on their structural properties. Finally, inspired by periodic structures in packings and materials, we propose and implement an algorithm for periodic Delaunay triangulations to be integrated into the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL), and discuss the implications on persistence for periodic data sets

Migration, trade, and development: an overview

Simple, neoclassical economic models predict that prices should drive factors such as labor and capital across regions and countries toward their most valuable use. As this happens, developing countries, which are typically labor-rich and capital-scarce, should experience more rapid growth, higher income, and eventually convergence to industrial world levels of well-being. This process is happening slowly in some cases, but in other cases not at all. Do migration and trade speed this convergence? If so, how? If not, why?Emigration and immigration ; International trade ; Economic development ; Developing countries

Politics and Trade Policy: An Empirical Investigation

In this paper we examine the empirical relevance of three prominent endogenous protection models. Is protection for sale, or do altruistic policy makers worry about political support? We find strong evidence that protection is indeed for sale. The important new result is, however, that not only the existence of lobbies matters, but also the relative size of the sectoral pro and anti protection contributions. All variables of both the Influence Driven (Grossman and Helpman, 1994) and the Tariff Function (Findlay and Wellisz, 1982) models are significant at the one percent level. Novel is our application of a single, unified theoretical framework to take strict interpretations of the three theoretical models to the data. We thus extend the previous tests of the Influence Driven approach by comparing its performance to well specified alternatives. Using J tests to compare the power of the models directly, we find significant misspecification in the Political Support Function approach. We cannot reject the null hypothesis of correct specification of the Influence Driven model and find evidence of some misspecification in the Tariff Function model