Economic Analysis of U.S. Immigration Reforms

In January 2004, President George Bush proposed the creation of a temporary worker program to allow more migrant workers to enter the US legally. This new temporary worker program would be open to undocumented workers in the US, as well as to prospective migrants currently residing abroad. The program would temporarily allow immigrants to fill jobs that, according to employers, would otherwise go unfilled at the current wage. The US Congress vetoed the presidential proposal, however, and requested a stricter enforcement of immigration law and the consequent deportation of undocumented immigrants. This study analyzes the economic effects of these immigration reforms on the US economy using an applied global general equilibrium model of migration. In this paper the global trade and migration model (GMig2) developed by Walmsley, Winters and Ahmed (2007) is modified to include a third labor category – undocumented unskilled – to reflect estimates of undocumented workers residing in the United States. The model is then used to analyze the impacts of two policy scenarios on the US economy: first, the deportation of undocumented workers currently residing in the US; and second, the legalization of undocumented agricultural workers. The first scenario is implemented through a decline in the number of undocumented workers residing in the US to zero, and a corresponding increase in the number of workers in Mexico. The second scenario is achieved by allowing undocumented workers to obtain legal status, thereby increasing their wages and productivity. We find that the deportation of undocumented workers causes a considerable loss to the US economy in terms of real GDP. Legalization of Mexican undocumented immigrants, on the other hand, is found to increase US real GDP. Hence the paper demonstrates there are clear advantages to the US economy of implementing proposals that both allow migrant workers to remain in the United States and increase the workers ability to participate freely in the US labor force as legal residents.US Undocumented Workers, Applied General Equilibrium, Political Economy,

Divesting power

We study alternative market power mitigation measures in a model where a dominant producer faces a competitive fringe with the same cost structure. We characterise the asset divestment by the dominant firm which achieves the greatest reduction in prices. This divestment entails the sale of marginal assets whose cost range encompasses the post-divestment price. A divestment of this type can be several times more effective in reducing prices than divestments of baseload (or low-cost) assets. We also establish that financial contracts (modeled as Virtual Power Plant schemes) are at best equivalent to baseload divestments in terms of consumer welfare.Divestments; Virtual power plants; contracts; market power; electricity; antitrust remedies;

Klebanov-Witten theory with massive dynamical flavors

We consider the addition of a large number of massive dynamical flavors to the Klebanov-Witten theory, the quiver gauge theory describing the low energy dynamics of Nc D3-branes at the conifold singularity. Massive flavors are introduced by means of Nf D7-branes which are holomorphically embedded and smeared along the transverse directions. After some general comments on the validity of the smearing procedure, we find the full backreacted supergravity solution corresponding to a particular class of massive embeddings. The solution depends on a running effective number of flavors, whose functional form follows from the smeared embedding. The running reflects the integrating in/out of massive degrees of freedom in the dual field theory as the energy scale is changed. We study how the dynamics of the theory depends on the flavor parameters, mainly focusing on the static quark-antiquark potential. As expected, we find that the dynamical flavors tend to screen the static color charges.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures; v2: few comments and a reference added, minor change

Foreclosing competition through access charges and price discrimination

This article analyzes competition between two asymmetric networks, an incumbent and a new entrant. Networks compete in non-linear tariffs and may charge different prices for on-net and off-net calls. Departing from cost-based access pricing allows the incumbent to foreclose the market in a profitable way. If the incumbent benefits from customer inertia, then it has an incentive to insist on the highest possible access markup even if access charges are reciprocal and even in the absence of actual switching costs. If instead the entrant benefits from customer activism, then foreclosure is profitable only when switching costs are large enough.Networks; benefits; costs; customer;

Time and energy-resolved two photon-photoemission of the Cu(100) and Cu(111) metal surfaces

We present calculations on energy- and time-resolved two-photon photoemission spectra of images states in Cu(100) and Cu(111) surfaces. The surface is modeled by a 1D effective potential and the states are propagated within a real-space, real-time method. To obtain the energy resolved spectra we employ a geometrical approach based on a subdivision of space into two regions. We treat electronic inelastic effects by taking into account the scattering rates calculated within a GW scheme. To get further insight into the decaying mechanism we have also studied the effect of the variation of the classical Hartree potential during the excitation. This effect turns out to be small.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Non chiral dynamical flavors and screening on the conifold

We present a new class of string theory solutions which are conjectured to be dual to the N=1 conifold theory by Klebanov and Witten coupled to non chiral massive dynamical flavors. These are introduced, in the Veneziano limit, by means of suitably embedded and smeared D7-branes whose full backreaction on the background is taken into account. The string solutions are used to study chromoelectric charge screening effects due to the dynamical flavors in the non perturbative regime of the dual gauge theories.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, previously unpublished results presented. Contribution to the proceedings of the RTN workshop "Constituents, Fundamental Forces and Symmetries of the Universe", Varna, Bulgaria, September 11-17, 200