Gender and ethnicity-married immigrants in Britain

In this paper we investigate economic activity of female immigrants and their husbands in Britain. We distinguish between two immigrant groups: foreign born females who belong to an ethnic minority group and their husbands, and foreign born females who are white and their husbands. We compare these to native born white women and their husbands. Our analysis deviates from the usual mean analysis and investigates employment, hours worked and earnings for males and females, as well as their combined family earnings, along the distribution of husbands’ economic potential. We analyse the extent to which economic disadvantage may be reinforced on the household level. We investigate to what extent disadvantage can be explained by differences in observable characteristics. We analyse employment assimilation for all groups over the migration cycle. Our main results are that white female immigrants and their husbands are quite successful, with an overall advantage in earnings over white native born both individually and at the household level. On the other hand, minority immigrants and their husbands are less successful, in particular at the lower end of the husband’s distribution of economic potential. This is mainly due to low employment of both genders, which leads to disadvantage in earnings, intensified at the household level. Only part of this differential can be explained by observable characteristics. Over the migration cycle, the data suggests that employment differentials are large at entry for white immigrant females, and even larger for minority females, but the gap to the native born closes. Assimilation is more rapid for white females

Opt Out Or Top Up? Voluntary Healthcare Insurance And The Public Vs. Private Substitution

We investigate whether people enrolled into voluntary health insurance (VHI) substitute public consumption with private (opt out) or just enlarge their private consumption, without reducing reliance upon public provisions (top up). We study the case of Italy, where a mixed insurance system is in place. To this purpose, we specify a joint model for public and private specialist visits counts, and allow for different degrees of endogenous supplementary insurance coverage, looking at the insurance coverage as driven by a trinomial choice process. We disentangle the effect of income and wealth by going through two channels: the direct impact on the demand for healthcare and that due to selection into VHI. We find evidence of opting out: richer and wealthier individuals consume more private services and concomitantly reduce those services publicly provided through selection into for-profit VHI. These results imply that the market for VHI eases the redistribution from high income (doubly insured) individuals to low income (not doubly insured) ones operated by the Italian National Health Service (NHS). Accounting for VHI endogeneity in the joint model of the two counts is crucial to this conclusion.

Conformal Gravity with Electrodynamics for Fermion Fields and their Symmetry Breaking Mechanism

In this paper we consider an axial torsion to build metric-compatible connections in conformal gravity, with gauge potentials; the geometric background is filled with Dirac spinors: scalar fields with suitable potentials are added eventually. The system of field equations is worked out to have torsional effects converted into spinorial self-interactions: the massless spinors display self-interactions of a specific form that gives them the features they have in the non-conformal theory but with the additional character of renormalizability, and the mechanisms of generation of mass and cosmological constants become dynamical. As a final step we will address the cosmological constant and coincidence problems.Comment: 13 page

The impact of immigration on the UK labour market

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the way immigration affects labour market outcomes of native born workers in the UK, set beside a theoretical discussion of the underlying economic mechanisms. We discuss the problems that may arise in empirical estimations, and suggest ways to address these problems. Our empirical analysis is based on data from the British Labour Force Survey. We show that the overall skill distribution of Britain’s immigrant workforce is remarkably similar to that of the native born workforce. We investigate the impact of immigration on employment, participation, unemployment and wages of the resident population. We find no evidence that immigration has overall effects on any of these outcomes at the aggregate level. There is some evidence that effects are different for different educational groups

Labour market performance of immigrants in the UK labour market

From executive summary: This document is a report commissioned by the Home Office to analyse the performance of immigrants in the UK labour market. It attempts to draw a comprehensive picture of the labour market performance of immigrants, and the process of adaptation relative to the UK-born white population. Four indicators of economic performance are investigated: (i) employment, (ii) labour force participation, (iii) self-employment, and (iv) wages. The analysis distinguishes between males and females, and between groups of different origin. The effects of specific variables on these outcomes are investigated in detail. The report also considers labour market outcomes of ethnic minority individuals who are born in the UK, and compares their outcomes with those of UK-born white individuals, and of ethnic minority individuals who are foreign-born