Can a brain drain be good for growth?

This paper shows how a brain drain - the emigration of agents with a relatively high level of human capital in an economy - can paradoxically increase the productivity of an economy where productivity is a function of the average level of human capital. The model uses Galor and Tsiddon's model of income distribution, endogenous human capital formation and growth, to analyze the interaction between income distribution and migration. The paradoxical positive effect of a brain drain on productivity occurs when successful emigration is not a certainty and when the increase in human capital accumulation by people wishing to become eligible to emigrate, causes a change in the long run income distribution which outweighs the decrease in human capital caused by the brain drain itself.Economic Growth;Human Capital;Income Distribution;Productivity;Emigration;macroeconomics

Trade dynamics and endogenous growth: An overlapping generations model

Growth Models;International Trade

The motion of a second class particle for the tasep starting from a decreasing shock profile

We prove a strong law of large numbers for the location of the second class particle in a totally asymmetric exclusion process when the process is started initially from a decreasing shock. This completes a study initiated in Ferrari and Kipnis [Ann. Inst. H. Poincare Probab. Statist. 13 (1995) 143-154].Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051605000000151 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The brain drain and the world distribution of income and population

This paper models the evolution of the world distribution of income and shows that while the distribution of income per capita across economies in the world will be stable in the long run, the world distribution of population may be divergent. The paper then uses this model to analyze the impact of the current trend towards predominantly skilled emigration from poor to rich countries on fertility, human capital formation, and growth, in both the sending and receiving countries. It shows that in the long run, brain drain migration patterns may increase world inequality as relatively poor countries grow large in terms of population. In the short run however, it is possible for world inequality to fall due to rises in GDP per capita in large developing economies with low skilled emigration rates

Limit laws of transient excited random walks on integers

We consider excited random walks (ERWs) on integers with a bounded number of i.i.d. cookies per site without the non-negativity assumption on the drifts induced by the cookies. Kosygina and Zerner [KZ08] have shown that when the total expected drift per site, delta, is larger than 1 then ERW is transient to the right and, moreover, for delta>4 under the averaged measure it obeys the Central Limit Theorem. We show that when delta in (2,4] the limiting behavior of an appropriately centered and scaled excited random walk under the averaged measure is described by a strictly stable law with parameter delta/2. Our method also extends the results obtained by Basdevant and Singh [BS08b] for delta in (1,2] under the non-negativity assumption to the setting which allows both positive and negative cookies.Comment: 27 page

Lyapunov exponents of random walks in small random potential: the lower bound

We consider the simple random walk on Z^d, d > 2, evolving in a potential of the form \beta V, where (V(x), x \in Z^d) are i.i.d. random variables taking values in [0,+\infty), and \beta\ > 0. When the potential is integrable, the asymptotic behaviours as \beta\ tends to 0 of the associated quenched and annealed Lyapunov exponents are known (and coincide). Here, we do not assume such integrability, and prove a sharp lower bound on the annealed Lyapunov exponent for small \beta. The result can be rephrased in terms of the decay of the averaged Green function of the Anderson Hamiltonian -\Delta\ + \beta V.Comment: 42 pages, 3 figure

What are the Effects of Fiscal Policy Shocks?

We investigate the effects of fiscal policy surprises for US data, using vector autoregressions.We overcome the difficulties that changes in fiscal policy may manifest themselves in variables other than fiscal variables first and that fiscal variables may respond 'automatically' to business cycle conditions.We do so by using sign restrictions on the impulse responses as method of identification, extending Uhlig (1997), and by imposing orthogonality to business cycle shocks and monetary policy shocks.We find that controlling for the business cycle shock is important, but controlling for the monetary policy shock is not, that government spending shocks crowd out both residential and on-residential investment but do not reduce consumption, that a deficit spending cut stimulates the economy for the first 4 quarters but has a low median multiplier of 0:5, and that a surprise tax increase has a contractionary effect on output, consumption and investment.Our results differ from the benchmarks of Ricardian equivalence and tax smoothing, and are more in line with theories which allow for intergenerational redistribution with limits to the compensating effects of bequests.The best fiscal policy for stimulating the economy appears to be a deficit-financed tax cut.fiscal policy;econometrics;monetary policy;business cycles;vector autoregressive models