Does Inequality Migrate? The Development of Income Inequality across German states

Data availability statement: The data used in this study comes from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), which is a comprehensive household survey conducted for more than 30 years. Oleg Badunenko and I are bound by the contract not to distribute data, so we can't share the data, but we would be happy to share detailed instructions on how to obtain the sample that was used. GSOEP is free of charge for academic researchers.Supporting Information is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1111/jors.12683 .Copyright © 2024 The Authors. This study analyzes the evolution of educational and occupational patterns among migrants and natives, as well as income inequality in Germany from 1985 to 2015. We show that despite migrants catching up in education, employment, and income with their native counterparts, unfavorable societal attitudes toward them have remained virtually unchanged, which can be attributed to Bourdieu's conceptualization of cultural inheritance. We find that while income inequality has increased significantly over the 30-year period, this trend varied considerably by the federal state and that migration did nothing to add to inequality. Since both the German economy and society rely on migrants, there is a strong need for the narratives toward migrants to be based on empirical evidence. The findings of this study hold migrant-related policy implications not only for Germany but also for other developed nations that rely on migrants as a labor force

Productivity Growth across Spanish Regions and Industries: A Production-Frontier Approach

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Regional Studies on 21 Aug 2012, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00343404.2012.709611Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology; Andalusian Council of Innovation and Scienc

When, where and how to estimate persistent and transient efficiency in stochastic frontier panel data models

In this paper we examine robustness of a recently developed panel data stochastic frontier model that allows for both persistent and transient (also known as long-run and short-run or time-invariant and time-varying) inefficiency along with random firm-effects (heterogeneity) and noise. We address some concerns that the practitioners might have about this model. First, given that there are two random time-invariant components (persistent inefficiency and firm-effects) the concern is whether the model can accurately identify them, and if so how precisely can the model estimate them? Second, there are two time-varying random components (transient inefficiency and noise), and the concern is whether the model can separate noise from transient inefficiency, and if so how precisely can the model estimate transient inefficiency? Third, how well are persistent and transient inefficiency estimated under different scenarios, viz., under different configurations of the variance parameters of the four random components? Given that the model is quite complex, relatively new and becoming quite popular in the panel efficiency literature, we feel that there is need for a detailed simulation study to examine when, where and how one can use this model with confidence to estimate persistent and transient inefficiency. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Better to grow or better to improve? Measuring environmental efficiency in OECD countries with a stochastic environmental Kuznets frontier (SEKF)

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2019 16th European Workshop on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis in London, UK and the 2022 8th International Symposium on Environment and Energy finance Issues, Paris France, and we are grateful to participants for their comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments that helped to significantly improve the paper. Nevertheless, the views expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent the views of their affiliated institutions and we are, of course, responsible for all errors and omissions.Copyright © 2023 The Authors. The standard approach to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) holds that as a country develops and GDP per capita grows environmental degradation initially increases but eventually it reaches a turning point where environmental degradation begins to decline. Environmental degradation takes many forms, one of them being emissions of harmful gases. According to the EKC concept, a country can reduce emissions by ‘growing’. The standard approach implicitly assumes that a country emits as little as possible for its economic development, whereas in reality, a country might emit above the best attainable level of emissions. Therefore, emissions could be reduced before and after the turning point by becoming more environmentally efficient – i.e., ‘improving’ the emissions level. This article proposes a Stochastic Environmental Kuznets Frontier (SEKF) which is estimated for CO2 emissions for OECD countries and used to benchmark each country before and after the turning point differently, thus, indicating how a country could ‘grow’ and/or ‘improve’ to reduce its CO2 emissions. Additionally, we analyse the role of the stringency of environmental policies in reducing a country's carbon inefficiency measured by the distance from the benchmark EKC and find widespread carbon inefficiencies that could be reduced by more stringent market-based environmental policies.This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors

On distinguishing the direct causal effect of an intervention from its efficiency-enhancing effects

Copyright © 2023 The Authors. This paper proposes an innovative methodology for handling endogeneity issues in the evaluation of policy performance. By estimating a regression discontinuity design with a four-component stochastic frontier panel data model, we estimate the causal impact of a policy intervention on the outcome variable, whenever the treatment status depends on an exogenous threshold. We distinguish between (i) the direct effect of the intervention, (ii) the efficiency-enhancing effect, or (iii) their combination. Moreover, we distinguish between persistent (time-invariant) and transient (time-varying) inefficiency components while accounting for unobserved heterogeneity, which is important for policy implications. We showcase the practical usefulness of the proposed approach by estimating the effect of providing additional resources on schools that exceed an exogenously set share of disadvantaged students in secondary schools in Flanders, Belgium. We also demonstrate the trade-off between balance of the covariates in the treated and control group and statistical power. Thus, despite insignificant effects in a balanced but smaller sample close to the discontinuity, the results become significant in the unbalanced sample with more statistical power. In both samples, we observe that the policy had an effect on the outcome mostly through the efficiency-enhancing channel. To this extent, we show that the model specification including both direct and indirect effects outperforms the other two specifications and it offers a more exhaustive perspective from a policy view point.Research Foundation – Flanders, FWO (Postdoctoral Fellowship 12U0219N)

Statistical inference for the Russell measure of technical efficiency

Lebesgue Center of Mathematics program PIA-ANR-11-LABX-0020-0