Did public wage premiums fuel agglomeration in LDCs?

We build and test a model of how the growth of public jobs with wage premiums may help to explain the high and potentially inefficient level of urbanization in LDCs. Public jobs comprise about 40% of non- agricultural employment in LDCs, and have frequently offered substantial wage premiums. The Harris-Todaro model - and its extensions- suggest that wage premiums induce inefficient agglomeration, but that model critically assumes that wage premium jobs are allocated to favor local residents. This is inapplicable to public appointments in various LDCs. In the two-region general equilibrium model discussed here, the existence of spatial mobility costs are shown to be sufficient for wage premiums to result in inefficient agglomeration in regions that are allocated wage premium jobs. This weakens the assumptions under which wage premiums promote agglomeration, and extends the idea to LDCs such as Egypt, Ethiopia, and Kenya, where public jobs have, until recent reforms, offered substantial wage premiums, but are not allocated so as to favor local residents. The policy implications of this model also differ from Harris-Todaro. For example, if wage premiums are later reduced, the agglomeration persists: with mobility costs, the history of the location of jobs with wage premiums matters. We explore our hypotheses using Egyptian data. Between 1960 and 1986 the share of public jobs increased from 10% to 34% of the labor force, public jobs were centrally allocated, and offered a high total compensation premium. We find that public jobs’ growth has substantially altered the pattern of regional mobility and population shares, in a way that is consistent with this theory of agglomeration due to wage premiums and mobility friction Keywords; public sector, agglomeration, migration, developing country JEL classification: J61, J68, J60, J45, H11 & H40

Return International Migration and Geographical Inequality: The Case of Egypt

This paper explores entrepreneurship amongst return migrants, how their business locations and characteristics differ from other businesses, and the implications for rural-urban inequality. First, we examine, amongst returnees, the determinants of investment in a project/enterprise. Second, we study the impact of return migration on the characteristics and nature of non-farm small enterprises using a sample of return migrants and non-migrant owners of enterprises. Our data indicate that although the share of return migrants originating in urban areas is almost equal to those from rural areas, and that migrants tend to return to their origin region, urban areas benefit more than rural areas from international savings. The empirical evidence suggests that ?return migration, remittances, developing countries, rural-urban inequality

Prepared for Practice? Exploring and Evaluating the First Six Months of Post-qualified Practice in Social Work

This project explores how effective the Social work degree has been in enabling graduates to feel prepared for the practice of social work. Quantitative and qualitative data from online questionnaires and interviews with twelve graduates revealed that graduates perceived they were more confident, despite coming from a background where they were already practicing. They identified ways that this confidence (including in ICT and IL skills) has contributed to their preparedness for practice and their willingness to shape and challenge practices. Areas of practice where graduates felt least prepared included working with hostile service users. In terms of ICT skills development, variations in systems and technologyrelated practices resulted in tensions between the degree providing supportive guidance which fit particular software or social work settings compared with less supportive generic guidance which might be more widely applicable. IL skills were perceived to have more generic applicability

General training by firms, apprentice contracts, and public policy

Workers will not pay for general on-the-job training if contracts are not enforceable. Firms may if there are mobility frictions. Private information about worker productivities, however, prevents workers who quit receiving their marginal products elsewhere. Their new employers then receive external benefits from their training. Training firms increase profits by offering apprenticeships committing them to high wages for trainees retained on completion. At those wages, only good workers are retained, which signals their productivity and reduces the external benefits if they subsequently quit. Regulation of apprenticeship length (a historically important feature) can enhance efficiency, as can appropriate subsidies.

Understanding emergency hospital admission of older people

This report sets out and discusses the findings of our study to gain an improved understanding of the drivers of emergency hospital admissions of older people in England and to formulate evidence-based scenarios for possible future trends in these emergency admissions. Commissioned by the Department of Health

The ageing society and emergency hospital admissions

There is strong policy interest, in England as elsewhere, in slowing the growth in emergency hospital admissions, which for older people increased by 3.3% annually between 2001/2 and 2012/3. Resource constrains have increased the importance of understanding rising emergency admissions, which in policy discourse is often explained by population aging. This study examines how far the rise in emergency admissions of people over 65 was due to population ageing, how far to the changing likelihood of entering hospital at each age, and how far to other factors which might be more amenable to policy measures. It shows that: admission rates rose with age from age 40 upward but each successive birth cohort experienced lower emergency admission rates after standardising for age and other effects. This downward cohort effect largely offset the consequences of an older and larger population aged over 65. Other factors which could explain increasing admissions, such as new technologies or rising expectations, appear more important than the changing size and age structure of the population as drivers of rising emergency admissions in old age. These findings suggest that stemming the rate of increase in emergency admissions of older people may be feasible, if challenging, despite population ageing

Living in mixed species groups promotes predator learning in degraded habitats

Living in mix-species aggregations provides animals with substantive anti-predator, foraging and locomotory advantages while simultaneously exposing them to costs, including increased competition and pathogen exposure. Given each species possess unique morphology, competitive ability, parasite vulnerability and predator defences, we can surmise that each species in mixed groups will experience a unique set of trade-offs. In addition to this unique balance, each species must also contend with anthropogenic changes, a relatively new, and rapidly increasing phenomenon, that adds further complexity to any system. This complex balance of biotic and abiotic factors is on full display in the exceptionally diverse, yet anthropogenically degraded, Great Barrier Reef of Australia. One such example within this intricate ecosystem is the inability of some damselfish to utilize their own chemical alarm cues within degraded habitats, leaving them exposed to increased predation risk. These cues, which are released when the skin is damaged, warn nearby individuals of increased predation risk and act as a crucial associative learning tool. Normally, a single exposure of alarm cues paired with an unknown predator odour facilitates learning of that new odour as dangerous. Here, we show that Ambon damselfish, Pomacentrus amboinensis, a species with impaired alarm responses in degraded habitats, failed to learn a novel predator odour as risky when associated with chemical alarm cues. However, in the same degraded habitats, the same species learned to recognize a novel predator as risky when the predator odour was paired with alarm cues of the closely related, and co-occurring, whitetail damselfish, Pomacentrus chrysurus. The importance of this learning opportunity was underscored in a survival experiment which demonstrated that fish in degraded habitats trained with heterospecific alarm cues, had higher survival than those we tried to train with conspecific alarm cues. From these data, we conclude that redundancy in learning mechanisms among prey guild members may lead to increased stability in rapidly changing environments

Does unemployment worsen babies' health? A tale of siblings, maternal behaviour and selection

We study the effect of unemployment on birth outcomes by exploiting geographical variation in the unemployment rate across local areas in England, and comparing siblings born to the same mother via family fixed effects. Using rich individual data from hospital administrative records between 2003 and 2012, babies’ health is found to be strongly procyclical. A one-percentage point increase in the unemployment rate leads to an increase in low birth weight and preterm babies of respectively 1.3 and 1.4%, and a 0.1% decrease in foetal growth. We find heterogenous responses: unemployment has an effect on babies’ health which varies from strongly adverse in the most deprived areas, to mildly favourable in the most prosperous areas. We provide evidence of three channels that can explain the overall negative effect of unemployment on new-born health: maternal stress; unhealthy behaviours - namely excessive alcohol consumption and smoking; and delays in the takeup of prenatal services. While the heterogenous effects of unemployment by area of deprivation seem to be explained by maternal behaviour. Most importantly, we also show for the first time that selection into fertility is the main driver for the previously observed, opposite counter-cyclical results, e.g., Dehejia and Lleras-Muney (2004). Our results are robust to internal migration, different geographical aggregation of the unemployment rate, the use of gender-specific unemployment rates, and potential endogeneity of the unemployment rate which we control for by using a shift-share instrumental variable approac

The 5-Phosphatase SHIP2 Promotes Neutrophil Chemotaxis and Recruitment

Neutrophils, the most abundant circulating leukocytes in humans have key roles in host defense and in the inflammatory response. Agonist-activated phosphoinositide 3-kinases (PI3Ks) are important regulators of many facets of neutrophil biology. PIP3 is subject to dephosphorylation by several 5' phosphatases, including SHIP family phosphatases, which convert the PI3K product and lipid second messenger phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphate (PIP3) into PI(3,4)P2, a lipid second messenger in its own right. In addition to the leukocyte restricted SHIP1, neutrophils express the ubiquitous SHIP2. This study analyzed mice and isolated neutrophils carrying a catalytically inactive SHIP2, identifying an important regulatory function in neutrophil chemotaxis and directionality in vitro and in neutrophil recruitment to sites of sterile inflammation in vivo, in the absence of major defects of any other neutrophil functions analyzed, including, phagocytosis and the formation of reactive oxygen species. Mechanistically, this is explained by a subtle effect on global 3-phosphorylated phosphoinositide species. This work identifies a non-redundant role for the hitherto overlooked SHIP2 in the regulation of neutrophils, and specifically, neutrophil chemotaxis/trafficking. It completes an emerging wider understanding of the complexity of PI3K signaling in the neutrophil, and the roles played by individual kinases and phosphatases within