Agricultural productivity shocks, labour reallocation and rural-urban migration in China

This article analyses the way households in rural China use rural-urban migration and off-farm work as a response to negative productivity shocks in agriculture. I employ various waves of a longitudinal survey to construct a panel of individual migration and labour supply histories, and match them to detailed weather information, which I use to instrument agricultural productivity. For identification, I exploit the year-by-county variation in growing season rainfalls to explain within-individual changes in labour allocation. Data on days of work supplied to each sector allow to study the responses to weather shocks along both the participation and the intensive margin. Results suggest that farming is reduced by 4.5% and migration increased by about 5% in response to a 1 standard deviation negative rainfall shock. Increase in rural-urban migration derives from both longer spells in the city and from increment in the likelihood to participate in the urban sector. I find interesting heterogeneous response across generations driven by age-specific productivities in the different sectors and migration costs. Finally, land tenure insecurity seems to partially prevent households from freely reallocating labour away from farming in bad times.I wish to gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Ministerio Economía y Competitividad (Spain), Maria de Maeztu grant (MDM 2014-0431), and the Comunidad de Madrid, MadEco-CM grant (S2015/HUM-3444).

News media and crime perceptions: evidence from a natural experiment

In democracies, voters rely on media outlets to learn about politically salient issues. This raises an important question: how strongly can media affect public perceptions? This paper uses a natural experiment - the staggered introduction of the Digital TV signal in Italy - to measure the effect of media persuasion on the perceptions individuals hold. We focus on crime perceptions and, combining channel-specific viewership and content data, we show that the reduced exposure to channels characterized by high levels of crime reporting decreases individual concerns about crime. The effect is driven by individuals aged 50 and over, who turn out to be more exposed to television while using other sources of information less frequently. Finally, we provide evidence about the effect of the digital introduction on public policies closely related to crime perceptions and on voting behaviourLuigi Minale acknowledges support from the Ministerio Economía y Competitividad (Spain), María de Maeztu grant (MDM 2014-0431), Comunidad de Madrid, MadEco-CM (S2015/HUM-3444), and Fundación Ramón Areces

Risk Attitudes and Household Migration Decisions

This paper analyses the relation between individual migrations and the risk attitudes of other household members when migration is a household decision. We develop a simple model that implies that which member migrates depends on the distribution of risk attitudes among all household members, and that the risk diversification gain to other household members may induce migrations that would not take place in an individual framework. Using unique data for China on risk attitudes of internal (rural-urban) migrants and the families left behind, we empirically test three key implications of the model: (i) that conditional on migration gains, less risk averse individuals are more likely to migrate; (ii) that within households, the least risk averse individual is more likely to emigrate; and (iii) that across households, the most risk averse households are more likely to send migrants as long as they have at least one family member with sufficiently low risk aversion. Our results not only provide evidence that migration decisions are taken on a household level but also that the distribution of risk attitudes within the household affects whether a migration takes place and who will emigrate

Agricultural Productivity Shocks, Labor Reallocation, and Rural-Urban Migration in China

This paper analyses the way households in rural China use rural-urban migration and off-farm work as a response to negative productivity shocks in agriculture. I employ various waves of a longitudinal survey to construct a panel of individual migration and labour supply histories, and match them to detailed weather information, which I use to instrument agricultural productivity. For identification, I exploit the year-by-county variation in growing season rainfalls to explain within-individual changes in labor allocation. Data on days of work supplied to each sector allow to study the responses to weather shocks along both the participation and the intensive margin. Results suggest that farming activity decreases by 4.5% while migration increases by about 5% in response to a 1-standard deviation negative rainfall shock. Increment in rural-urban migration derives from both longer spells in the city as well as raise in the likelihood to participate in the urban sector. I find interesting heterogeneous responses across generations driven by age-specific migration costs and changes in the relative productivity of sectors. Finally, land tenure insecurity seems to partially prevent households from freely reallocating labor away from farming in bad times

Constituents of the digestive gland of the molluscs of the genus - I. Novel diterpenes from

Dictyol A (I) and B (II; R = OH) and pachydictyol A (II; R = H) were isolated from the digestive glands of A. depilans. The structures of I and II (R = OH) were detd. from chem. and spectral data. I and II (R = OH) arose from feeding by A. depilans on the brown algae Dictyota dichotoma

Information and Crime Perceptions: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

This paper investigates the influence of media on the beliefs and perceptions individuals hold, with a focus on crime perceptions. We study the case of Italy, where the majority of television channels have been under the influence of the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for more than a decade. First, we document that these channels systematically over represent crime news compared to others. We then test if individuals revise their perceptions about crime when exposure to news programs broadcast by a specific group of partisan channels is reduced. In order to identify the causal effect we exploit a natural experiment in the Italian television market where the staggered introduction of the digital TV signal led to a drastic drop in the viewing shares of the channels above. Combining unique data on each channel's crime news coverage and prime-time viewing shares, we find that reduced exposure to crime related news decreased concerns about crime, an effect that is mainly driven by older individuals who, on average, watch more television and use alternative sources of information (such as Internet, radio and newspapers) less frequently. Finally, we show that this change in crime perceptions is likely to have important implications for voting behaviour

Lift the Ban? Initial Employment Restrictions and Refugee Labour Market Outcomes

This article investigates the medium to long-term effects on refugee labour market outcomes of the temporary employment bans being imposed in many countries on recently arrived asylum seekers. Using a newly collected dataset covering almost 30 years of employment restrictions together with individual data for refugees entering European countries between 1985 and 2012, our empirical strategy exploits the geographical and temporal variation in employment bans generated by staggered introduction and removal coupled with frequent changes at the intensive margin. We find that exposure to a ban at arrival reduces refugee employment probability in post-ban years by 15%, an impact driven primarily by lower labour market participation. These effects are not mechanical, since we exclude refugees who may still be subject to employment restrictions, are non-linear in ban length, confirming that the very first months following arrival play a key role in shaping integration prospects, and last up to 10 years post arrival. We further demonstrate that the detrimental effects of employment bans are concentrated among less educated refugees, translate into lower occupational quality, and seem not to be driven by selective migration. Our causal estimates are robust to several identification tests accounting for the potential endogeneity of employment ban policies, including placebo analysis of non-refugee migrants and an instrumental variable strategy. To illustrate the costs of these employment restrictions, we estimate a EUR 37.6 billion output loss from the bans imposed on asylum seekers who arrived in Europe during the so-called 2015 refugee crisis

(The Struggle for) Refugee Integration into the Labour Market: Evidence from Europe

In this paper, we use repeated cross-sectional survey data to study the labour market performance of refugees across several EU countries and over time. In the first part, we document that labour market outcomes for refugees are consistently worse than those for other comparable migrants. The gap remains sizeable even after controlling for individual characteristics as well as for unobservables using a rich set of fixed effects and interactions between area of origin, entry cohort and destination country. Refugees are 11.6 percent less likely to have a job and 22.1 percent more likely to be unemployed than migrants with similar characteristics. Moreover, their income, occupational quality and labour market participation are also relatively weaker. This gap persists until about 10 years after immigration. In the second part, we assess the role of asylum policies in explaining the observed refugee gap. We conduct a difference-in-differences analysis that exploits the differential timing of dispersal policy enactment across European countries: we show that refugee cohorts exposed to these polices have persistently worse labour market outcomes. Further, we find that entry cohorts admitted when refugee status recognition rates are relatively high integrate better into the host country labour market

The Unique 6-(p-Hydroxyphenyl)-2H-3,4-Dihydro-1,1-Dioxo-1,4-Thiazine and the New Tripeptide L-Glu-Gly-4-Hydroxystirylamine from the Marine Sponge Anchinoe tenacior

In our continuing search for bioactive compounds from marine organisms, we reported previously the isolation of a dimeric peptide alkaloid, anchinopeptolide A, from the Mediterranean sponge Anchinoe tenacior. Here we describe the isolation and structure elucidation of an unique metabolite 1, which incorporates a 1,1-dioxo-1,4 thiazine ring, and of a new tripeptide(2), from the sponge A. tenacior

Lift the Ban? Initial Employment Restrictions and Refugee Labour Market Outcomes

This article investigates the medium to long-term effects on refugee labour market outcomes of the temporary employment bans being imposed in many countries on recently arrived asylum seekers. Using a newly collected dataset covering almost 30 years of employment restrictions together with individual data for refugees entering European countries between 1985 and 2012, our empirical strategy exploits the geographical and temporal variation in employment bans generated by staggered introduction and removal coupled with frequent changes at the intensive margin. We find that exposure to a ban at arrival reduces refugee employment probability in post-ban years by 15%, an impact driven primarily by lower labour market participation. These effects are not mechanical, since we exclude refugees who may still be subject to employment restrictions, are non-linear in ban length, confirming that the very first months following arrival play a key role in shaping integration prospects, and last up to 10 years post arrival. We further demonstrate that the detrimental effects of employment bans are concentrated among less educated refugees, translate into lower occupational quality, and seem not to be driven by selective migration. Our causal estimates are robust to several identification tests accounting for the potential endogeneity of employment ban policies, including placebo analysis of non-refugee migrants and an instrumental variable strategy. To illustrate the costs of these employment restrictions, we estimate a EUR 37.6 billion output loss from the bans imposed on asylum seekers who arrived in Europe during the so-called 2015 refugee crisis