The Emerging Personality of the American Corporation

Reviewing Eric W. Orts, Business Persons: A Legal Theory of the Firm, and Robert E. Wright, Corporation Nation

Demographic change and housing markets (Conference report)

Professor Robert E Wright of the Department of Economics, University of Strathclyde organised a one-day workshop titled: "Demographic Change and Housing Markets", held in Glasgow on February 15, 2012. The workshop consisted of six presentations and was attended by over 40 participants from academia, government, charities and business. The workshop was funded by the Scottish Institute of Research in Economics (SIRE) and the Scottish Economic Society (SES). The workshop brought together individuals carrying out current and leading research into the major links between demographic change and housing markets

The Deadlist of Games: A Model of the Duel

Recent historical research indicates that ritualistic dueling had a rational basis. Basically, under certain social and economic conditions, individuals must fight in order to maintain their personal credit and social standing. A model of the duel, therefore, can be constructed. We model the duel as a two--players sequential game. This paper shows that the optimal strategy of each player depends upon the value of three parameters, namely, ``cost of fighting,'' ``cost of shame'', and ``value of courage.''teaching, game theory, general economics

School Quality, Educational Attainment and Aggregation Bias

Data from 31 countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is used to estimate education production functions for reading literacy.The analysis suggests that the probability of finding statistically significant and correctly signed class size effects increases the higher the level of aggregation used to measure class size.Class size, PISA data, bias

Chasing Graduate Jobs?

ABSTRACT Chasing Graduate Jobs? * This paper examines empirically the relationship between under-employment and migration amongst five cohorts of graduates of Scottish higher education institutions with micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency. The data indicate that there is a strong positive relationship between migration and graduate employment -those graduates who move after graduation from Scotland to the rest of the UK or abroad have a much higher rate of graduate employment. Versions of probit regression are used to estimate migration and graduate employment equations in order to explore the nature of this relationship further. These equations confirm that there is a strong positive relationship between the probability of migrating and the probability of being in graduate employment even after other factors are controlled for. Instrumental variables estimation is used to examine the causal nature of the relationship by attempting to deal with the potential endogeneity of migration decisions. Overall the analysis is consistent with the hypotheses that a sizeable fraction of higher education graduates are leaving Scotland for employment reasons. In turn this finding suggests the over-education/under-employment nexus is a serious problem in Scotland. JEL Classification: I23, J24, J61, R2

Population ageing and immigration policy

In its simplest interpretation, population ageing is the increase in the average or median age of a population. It is the process by which there is a redistribution of relative population shares away from the younger to the older age groups

Chasing graduate jobs?

This paper examines empirically the relationship between under-employment and migration amongst five cohorts of graduates of Scottish higher education institutions with micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency. The data indicate that there is a strong positive relationship between migration and graduate employment—those graduates who move after graduation from Scotland to the rest of the UK or abroad have a much higher rate of graduate employment. Versions of probit regression are used to estimate migration and graduate employment equations in order to explore the nature of this relationship further. These equations confirm that there is a strong positive relationship between the probability of migrating and the probability of being in graduate employment even after other factors are controlled for. Instrumental variables estimation is used to examine the causal nature of the relationship by attempting to deal with the potential endogeneity of migration decisions. Overall the analysis is consistent with the hypotheses that a sizeable fraction of higher education graduates are leaving Scotland for employment reasons. In turn this finding suggests the over-education/under-employment nexus is a serious problem in Scotland

Graduate migration flows in Scotland

This paper examines the nature of graduate migration flows in Scotland. Migration equation is estimated with micro-data from a matched dataset of Students and Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education information collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA). The probability of migrating from Scotland is related to a set of observable characteristics. These logit regressions are estimated separately for Scotland-domiciled and rest-of-the-UK domiciled graduates and separately for under-graduates graduates and postgraduate graduates. The analysis suggests that migration is a selective process with what can be termed “high achievers” having a higher probability of leaving Scotland after graduation

Macroeconomic impact of ageing population in Scotland: a computable general equilibrium analysis

This paper combines a multi-period economic Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modelling framework with a demographic model to analyse the macroeconomic impact of the projected demographic trends in Scotland. Demographic trends are defined by the existing fertility-mortality rates and the level of annual net-migration. We employ a combination of a demographic and a CGE simulation to track the impact of changes in demographic structure upon macroeconomic variables under different scenarios for annual migration. We find that positive net migration can cancel the expected negative impact upon the labour market of other demographic changes. (Pressure on wages, falling employment). However, the required size of the annual net-migration is far higher than the current trends. The policy implication suggested by the results is that active policies are needed to attract migrants. We nevertheless report results when varying fertility and mortality assumptions. The impact of varying those assumptions is rather small