Immigration accounting: U.S. states 1960-2006

Different U.S. states have been affected by immigration to very different extents in recent years. Immigration increases available workers in a state economy and, because of its composition across education groups, it also increases the relative supply of less educated workers. However, immigration is more than a simple labor supply shock. It brings differentiated skills and more competition to the labor market and it may induce efficient specialization and affect the choice of techniques. Immigrants also affect investments, capital accumulation, and the productivity of more and less educated workers. Using a production function-based procedure and data on gross state product, physical capital and hours worked we analyze the impact of immigration on production factors (capital, more and less educated labor), and productivity over the period 1960-2006 for 50 U.S. states plus D.C. We apply growth accounting techniques to the panel of states in order to identify the changes in factors and productivity associated with immigration. To identify a causal impact we use the part of immigration that is determined by supply shifts in countries of origin and the geographical location of U.S. states or historical immigrants’ settlements. We find that immigration significantly increased the relative supply of less educated workers, that it did not affect much the level of capital per worker and that it significantly increased the productivity of highly educated workers and, even more, less educated workers. These channels together explain the small effect of immigrants on wages of less educated workers and the significant positive effects on wages of more educated workers

The effects of immigration on U.S. wages and rents: a general equilibrium approach

In this paper we document a strong positive correlation of immigration flows with changes in average wages and average house rents for native residents across U.S. states. Instrumental variables estimates reveal that the correlations are compatible with a causal interpretation from immigration to wages and rents of natives. Separating the effects of immigrants on natives of different schooling levels we find positive effects on the wages and rents of highly educated and small effects on the wages (negative) and rents (positive) of less educated. We propose a model where natives and immigrants of three different education levels interact in production in a central district and live in the surrounding region. In equilibrium the inflow of immigrants has a positive productive effect on natives due to complementarities in production as well as a positive competition effect on rents. The model calibrated and simulated with U.S.-states data matches most of the estimated effects of immigrants on wages and rents of natives in the period 1990-2005. This validation suggests the proposed model as a useful tool to evaluate the impacts of alternative immigration scenarios on U.S. wages and rents

Return migration as channel of brain gain

Recent theoretical and empirical studies have emphasized the fact that the prospect of international migration increases the expected returns to skills in poor countries, linking the possibility of migrating (brain drain) with incentives to higher education (brain gain). If emigration is uncertain and some of the highly educated remain, such a channel may, at least in part, counterbalance the negative effects of brain drain. Moreover, recent empirical evidence seems to show that temporary migration is widespread among highly skilled migrants (such as Eastern Europeans in Western Europe and Asians in the U.S.). This paper develops a simple tractable overlapping generations model that provides an economic rationale for return migration and which predicts who will migrate and who will return among agents with heterogeneous abilities. We use parameter values from the literature and the data on return migration to calibrate our model and simulate and quantify the effects of increased openness on human capital and wages of the sending countries. We find that, for plausible values of the parameters, the return migration channel is very important and combined with the incentive channel reverses the brain drain into significant brain gain for the sending country

Highly-educated immigrants and native occupational choice

Economic debate about the consequences of immigration in the US has largely focused on how influxes of foreign-born labor with little educational attainment have affected similarly-educated native-born workers. Fewer studies analyze the effect of immigration within the market for highly-educated labor. We use O*NET data on job characteristics to assess whether native-born workers with graduate degrees respond to an increased presence of highly-educated foreign-born workers by choosing new occupations with different skill content. We find that immigrants with graduate degrees specialize in occupations demanding quantitative and analytical skills, whereas their native-born counterparts specialize in occupations requiring interactive and communication skills. When the foreign-born proportion of highly educated employment within an occupation rises, native employees with graduate degrees choose new occupations with less analytical and more communicative content. For completeness, we also assess whether immigration causes highly educated natives to lose their jobs or move across state boundaries. We find no evidence that either occurs

Task specialization, immigration, and wages

Many workers with low levels of educational attainment immigrated to the United States in recent decades. Large inflows of less-educated immigrants would reduce wages paid to comparably-educated native-born workers if the two groups are perfectly substitutable in production. In a simple model exploiting comparative advantage, however, we show that if less-educated foreign and native-born workers specialize in performing different tasks, immigration will cause natives to reallocate their task supply, thereby reducing downward wage pressure. We merge occupational task-intensity data from the O*NET and DOT datasets with individual Census data across US states from 1960-2000 to demonstrate that foreign-born workers specialize in occupations that require manual and physical labor skills while natives pursue jobs more intensive in communication and language tasks. Immigration induces natives to specialize accordingly. Simulations show that this increased specialization might explain why economic analyses commonly find only modest wage and employment consequences of immigration for less-educated native-born workers across U.S. states. This is especially true in states with large immigration flows

The labor market impact of immigration in Western Germany in the 1990’s

In this article we measure the effects of recent immigration on the Western German labor market looking at both wage and employment effects. Refining administrative data for the period 1987-2001 to account for ethnic German immigrants and immigrants from Eastern Germany, we find that the substantial immigration of the 1990’s had very little adverse effects on native wages and on their employment levels. Instead, it had a sizable adverse employment effect as well as a small adverse wage effect on previous waves of immigrants. These asymmetric results are partly driven by a higher degree of substitution between old and new immigrants in the labor market. In a simple calculation we show that the largest aggregate effect of new immigration on natives and old immigrants comes from the increased costs of unemployment benefits to old immigrants. Those costs could be eliminated in a world of wage flexibility and no unemployment insurance in which immigration would not have any negative employment effect but only moderate wage effects

How alternative food networks work in a metropolitan area? An analysis of Solidarity Purchase Groups in Northern Italy

Our paper focuses on Solidarity Purchase Group (SPG) participants located in a highly urbanized area, with the aim to investigate the main motivations underlining their participation in a SPG and provide a characterization of them. To this end, we carried out a survey of 795 participants involved in 125 SPGs in the metropolitan area of Milan (Italy). Taking advantage of a questionnaire with 39 questions, we run a factor analysis and a two-step cluster analysis to identify different profiles of SPG participants. Our results show that the system of values animating metropolitan SPG practitioners does not fully conform to that traditionally attributed to an alternative food network (AFN). In fact, considerations linked to food safety and healthiness prevail on altruistic motives such as environmental sustainability and solidarity toward small producers. Furthermore, metropolitan SPGs do not consider particularly desirable periurban and local food products. Observing the SPGs from this perspective, it emerges as such initiatives can flourish also in those places where the lack of connection with the surrounding territory is counterbalanced by the high motivation to buy products from trusted suppliers who are able to guarantee genuine and safe products, not necessarily located nearby

Dielectric response of modified Hubbard models with neutral-ionic and Peierls transitions

The dipole P(F) of systems with periodic boundary conditions (PBC) in a static electric field F is applied to one-dimensional Peierls-Hubbard models for organic charge-transfer (CT) salts. Exact results for P(F) are obtained for finite systems of N = 14 and 16 sites that are almost converged to infinite chains in deformable lattices subject to a Peierls transition. The electronic polarizability per site, \alpha_{el} = (\partial P/\partial F)_0, of rigid stacks with alternating transfer integrals t(1 +/- \delta) diverges at the neutral-ionic transition for \delta = 0 but remains finite for \delta > 0 in dimerized chains. The Peierls or dimerization mode couples to charge fluctuations along the stack and results in large vibrational contributions, \alpha_{vib}, that are related to \partial P/\partial \delta and that peak sharply at the Peierls transition. The extension of P(F) to correlated electronic states yields the dielectric response \kappa of models with neutral-ionic or Peierls transitions, where \kappa peaks >100 are found with parameters used previously for variable ionicity \rho and vibrational spectra of CT salts. The calculated \kappa accounts for the dielectric response of CT salts based on substituted TTFs (tetrathiafulvalene) and substituted CAs (chloranil). The role of lattice stiffness appears clearly in models: soft systems have a Peierls instability at small \rho and continuous crossover to large \rho, while stiff stacks such as TTF-CA have a first-order transition with discontinuous \rho that is both a neutral-ionic and Peierls transition. The transitions are associated with tuning the electronic ground state of insulators via temperature or pressure in experiments, or via model parameters in calculations.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures; J.Chem.Phys., in pres

Leading agritourism facilities along Nearly Zero Energy paths: Proposal of an easy-to-use evaluation method

The tourist sector, despite the present severe constraints imposed by the sanitary emergence, can be considered as an important component of almost all countries' economies. In Italy agriturism, in particular, has been experiences a continuously rising trend in recent years. Clearly, such great interest towards these businesses also calls for a deep attention by an energy point of view, in sight of an energy efficiency improvement, hence a lowering of the pressure that such facilities exert to the natural environment. On the other hand, the European Union has been engaged, for a long time, in awarding the tourist accommodations environmental excellence brands, like the EU Ecolabel. Unfortunately, the achievement of such excellence brands requires the capability of managing complex energy and environmental data, which is often not the prerogative of people running such facilities. In order of contributing to overcome this difficulty, and with the aim of helping the addressing of agritourism towards a Nearly Zero Energy path, we propose here a simple approach that does not require the modelling and simulation of the energy behaviour of an agritourism, being essentially based on the application of easy-to-use ARERA (Italian Regulatory Authority for Energy Networks and Environment) datasheets scheme. On purpose, an application of the method, involving two typical Sicilian agritourism, is presented. The obtained results showed the viability of the proposed methodology, although the need of an update and/or replacement of some technical datasheets arose

Transcriptional regulation of murine NADP+-dependent methylenetetrahydrofolate dehydrogenase-cyclohydrolase-synthetase

AbstractThe cytosolic NADP+-dependent methylenetetrahydrofolate dehydrogenase-methenyltetrahydrofolate cyclohydrolase-formyltetrahydrofolate synthetase is ubiquitously expressed in all mouse tissues and cell lines examined. Northern analyses of the RNA indicated that there is an extensive variation in the levels of mRNA in different tissues. However, the gene is refractory to induction by serum, phorbol esters or growth factors in cultured fibroblasts. The mRNA of the NADP′-dependent trifunctional enzyme is stabilized post-transcriptionally by insulin-like growth factor-1