How do NMS immigrants fare within the enlarged EU labour market? The case of Ireland

This paper explores the relationship between occupational downgrading and the wages of NMS immigrants to Ireland by taking advantage of two data sources, the Irish Census and the Survey on Income and Living Conditions. The study identifies biases in SILC that dampen the estimated earnings disadvantage of NMS immigrants. Correcting population weights that match SILC against the Census are suggested. These have a significant impact on results for NMS immigrants, increasing both the size of their wage penalty and the extent to which their wage gap can be explained by occupational downgrading. The corrected wage penalties identified for Ireland are comparable to recently published results for the UK.

Earnings Inequality, Institutions and the Macroeconomy – What Can We Learn from Ireland’s Boom Years?

Rapid economic growth is often expected to lead to increased returns to education and skills and thus to rising wage inequality. Ireland offers a valuable case study, with distinctive wage-setting institutions and exceptional rates of growth in output, employment and incomes in the Celtic Tiger period from 1994 to 2007. We find that dispersion in (hourly) wage inequality fell sharply to 2000, before increasing though much less sharply to 2007. Returns to both education and work experience declined considerable in the earlier period, while the increase in lower earnings relative to the median was associated with the introduction of the minimum wage in 2000, anchoring the bottom of the distribution. For 2000-2007 the faster increase in higher earnings may be associated with the changing pattern of immigration and of the employment growth in the second half of the boom, Further exploration of the factors at work towards the top of the distribution during these years is an important research priority.

When general skills are not enough: the influence of recent shifts in Australian skilled migration policy on migrant employment outcomes

This report focusses on the effects on migrant labour market outcomes of Australia’s recent shift from a points-based “supply driven” model that favoured independent General Skilled Migrants, to a “hybrid model” that balances supply driven migration against Employer Sponsored “demand driven” migration. Abstract Although many countries are now using skilled migration to offset declining fertility and increased longevity, there is thin empirical evidence concerning the effects of alternative approaches to managing the skilled migrant intake. This study focusses on the effects on migrant labour market outcomes of Australia’s recent shift from a points-based “supply driven” model that favoured independent General Skilled Migrants, to a “hybrid model” that balances supply driven migration against Employer Sponsored “demand driven” migration. We find that the shift to a hybrid model of skilled migration resulted in substantively improved rates of employment amongst skilled migrants without an accompanying deterioration in the average distribution of occupational outcomes. &nbsp

The effects of self-driving vehicles on the insurance industry

In a not too distant future, autonomous vehicles might be part of our life, offering us a new type of mobility with promising benefits. Nevertheless, they are also expected to disrupt our environment in all kind of manners and potentially threaten sectors related to transports and mobility. The main objective of this thesis was to understand and find out the different effects that those could have on the Swiss auto-insurance industry. Indeed, so far, many opinions related to the problematic were expressed, however very few were directly considering the Swiss environment with its different infrastructures, stakeholders and mentalities. Therefore, we wanted to understand how those vehicles still in development, would impact the Swiss insurance organisations, their internal activities and their products. We wanted to understand the general dynamism going behind their development and try to point out how the different stages of their evolutions would impact the operations of insurance companies. This project revealed that because of the none-existence of adapted regulations, current self-driving systems were in fact considered as driving assistances to comply with the existing regulations as well as the Vienna Convention. As a consequence, the drivers are similarly liable and still required to subscribe a civil liability insurance policy. Findings were also reflecting the idea that until performances reach a certain level of reliability, regulations would not evolve and neither insurance products. It would only be at the time the legal framework is clearly established that insurance institutions would react. Depending on those evolutions, a new era of auto insurance services could arise. Indeed, insurance organisations might be evolving in a different environment, where mobility on demand would become prospering and corporations obliged to ensure their own vehicles, while the overall quantity of those might be significantly reduced. As a result, insurance institutions might have to deal with a different clientele, made of large corporations with strong bargaining power and a decreased quantity of individuals. Besides, autonomous vehicles will also implicate an evolution of the risks involved. Indeed, the risks related to driving could become irrelevant, while the ones emerging from cyber aspects could become particularly important. In response to those different vehicles, those emerging risks and those different customers, insurance companies might have to reassess their know-how, the way they operate and potentially expand their areas of expertise, while developing new sets of skills allowing them to design innovative products meeting the needs of a different environment

Drivers of employment outcomes amongst skilled migrants to Australia

During the last 2 decades Australia has very substantially increased its skilled migration intake to off-set the effects of declining fertility and increased longevity. Between 1996 and 2011, permanent arrivals in Australia rose from 85000 to 195000 per year, with 83 per cent of the increase accounted for by migration through the Skill Stream. Furthermore, since the mid-2000s Australian skilled migration policy has shifted from a “supply driven” model that favoured independent General Skilled Migrants, to a “hybrid model” that balances supply driven migration against Employer Sponsored “demand driven” migration. van de Ven and Voitchovsky (2014) report estimates for the period between 2005 and 2009, which indicate that this shift to a hybrid model for selection substantively improved labour market outcomes amongst skilled migrants. Here we explore the channels through which improved labour market outcomes were achieved. Our investigation emphasises the likely importance of English language and experience in delivering improved employment outcomes, aspects that are imperfectly controlled for in our first empirical study

Drivers of employment outcomes amongst skilled migrants to Australia

During the last 2 decades Australia has very substantially increased its skilled migration intake to off-set the effects of declining fertility and increased longevity. Between 1996 and 2011, permanent arrivals in Australia rose from 85000 to 195000 per year, with 83 per cent of the increase accounted for by migration through the Skill Stream. Furthermore, since the mid-2000s Australian skilled migration policy has shifted from a “supply driven” model that favoured independent General Skilled Migrants, to a “hybrid model” that balances supply driven migration against Employer Sponsored “demand driven” migration. van de Ven and Voitchovsky (2014) report estimates for the period between 2005 and 2009, which indicate that this shift to a hybrid model for selection substantively improved labour market outcomes amongst skilled migrants. Here we explore the channels through which improved labour market outcomes were achieved. Our investigation emphasises the likely importance of English language and experience in delivering improved employment outcomes, aspects that are imperfectly controlled for in our first empirical study

Top incomes and the gender divide

In the recent research on top incomes, there has been little discussion of gender. How many of the top 1 and 10 per cent are women? A great deal is known about gender differentials in earnings, but how far does this carry over to the distribution of total incomes, bringing self-employment and capital income into the picture? We investigate the gender divide at the top of the income distribution using tax record data for a sample of eight countries with individual taxation. We show that women are under-represented at the top of the distribution. They account for between a fifth and a third of those in the top 10 per cent. Higher up the income distribution, the proportion is lower, with women constituting between 14 and 22 per cent of the top 1 per cent. The presence of women in the top income groups has generally increased over time, but the rise becomes smaller at the very top. As a result, the gradient with income has become more marked: the under-representation of women today increases more sharply. Examination of the shape of the income distribution by fitting a Pareto distribution shows that at the end of the period women disappear faster than men as one moves up the income scale in all countries. In this sense, there appears to be something of a “glass ceiling” for women. In the case of Canada, Denmark, Norway and New Zealand, there appears to have been a reversal over time, with the slope of the upper tail having been steeper for women in the past. In seeking to explain this, we highlight the role of income composition, where we show that there have been significant changes over time, underlining the fact that it is not sufficient to look only at earned income

Lipid bilayer fluidity and degree of order regulates small EVs adsorption on model cell membrane

Small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) are known to play an important role in the communication between distant cells and to deliver biological information throughout the body. To date, many studies have focused on the role of sEVs characteristics such as cell origin, surface composition, and molecular cargo on the resulting uptake by the recipient cell. Yet, a full understanding of the sEV fusion process with recipient cells and in particular the role of cell membrane physical properties on the uptake are still lacking. Here we explore this problem using sEVs from a cellular model of triple-negative breast cancer fusing to a range of synthetic planar lipid bilayers both with and without cholesterol, and designed to mimic the formation of ‘raft’-like nanodomains in cell membranes. Using time-resolved Atomic Force Microscopy we were able to track the sEVs interaction with the different model membranes, showing the process to be strongly dependent on the local membrane fluidity. The strongest interaction and fusion is observed over the less fluid regions, with sEVs even able to disrupt ordered domains at sufficiently high cholesterol concentration. Our findings suggest the biophysical characteristics of recipient cell membranes to be crucial for sEVs uptake regulation

Differently unequal: Zooming-in on the distributional dimensions of the crisis in euro area countries

This paper discusses how income inequality developed during the current crisis in euro area countries, as well as the role played by each income source. Based on an extended definition of income - including additional components which do not appear in the standard Eurostat definitions - we complement the information provided by the Gini index and quantile ratios by computing an alternative inequality indicator, developed by Zenga (2007), and its decomposition by income source. While broadly confirming the distributional effect of the crisis documented in previous studies, we find that in specific countries the level of inequality appears higher when alternative measures are taken into account, and that the rise of inequality since 2008 has not been as modest as the previous studies would suggest. The paper further looks at how the distribution of income has evolved during the crisis by income quantile groups (i.e. 'zooming-in'). The results point to varying contribution of labour income in 2011 compared to 2007. In addition, while the impact of individual households' characteristics shows a non-linear pattern across income quantile groups before the crisis, such dispersion has decreased in 2011.We argue that, on the basis of our analysis, not only euro area countries are "differently unequal" in that inequality has developed in a very peculiar way in different countries, but also because it needs to be tackled at a finer level of analysis