“The Impact of Housing Market Institutions on Labour Mobility: A European Cross-Country Comparison.” ENEPRI Working Paper No. 54, July 2007

This paper examines the effects of housing market institutions on labour mobility. The authors construct durations for individuals leaving their current job for a different job, becoming unemployed or leaving the labour market, from a sample of households from 14 European countries in 1994-2001. This data are then merged with country-specific housing market institutions, such as transaction taxes, and language and religion diversity. Similar to previous studies, estimated hazards indicate that home-ownership reduces job-to-job mobility as well as the probability to become unemployed or economically inactive on an individual level. However, a comparison between countries reveals that countries with high levels of home-ownership rates also have high levels of unemployment. Therefore, this paper is able to reconcile the seemingly contrasting empirical results from both the macroeconomic and the microeconomic level

Do Dutch Musea Compete Or Cooperate?

This paper looks into the effect of distance on market shares of Dutch museums. To this end, we assume a generic distance decay function for all museums. In addition, we allow for spatial dependence between museums to account for local competition or synergy effects. Using a unique transaction database with the visiting behavior of 80,821 museum cardholders to 108 Dutch museums, we are able to calculate market shares of each museum in all 484 Dutch municipalities. To account for possible measurement error in the market shares, we adopt a spatial two error component model. Finally, we allow for additional heterogeneity by segmenting the 108 museums using a mixture approach. Without segmenting, preliminary results indicate positive spatial dependence between museums, which points to the conclusion that -- in general -- museums benefit from each others presence.

Telework, Frequency of Working Out-of-home, and Commuting: A Labor Supply Model and an Application to the Netherlands

This paper analyses the case where workers have to choose between the location of work, leisure, commuting hours and the frequency to work out-of-home. Both a short-run and a long-run model are presented. In the short-run, workers are not able to set their optimal amount of commuting time, where in the long-run commuting time is treated as an endogenous variable. Moreover, frequency of working out-of-home is explicitly taken in to account, where it is assumed that there is op optimal frequency of commuting trips. An empirical model and estimation results for the Netherlands are offered. Preliminary results are that workers have an intrinsic preference to work out-of-home approximately 2.5 days a week and need at least 14 hours of leisure time

Valuation of ethnic diversity:Heterogeneous effects in an integrated labor and housing market

We estimate the heterogeneous impact of the scale, composition and consumer good effect of ethnic diversity on individuals' job and residential location. Using an extensive pooled micro panel data set in which homeowners in the Netherlands are identified in both the housing and labor market, we can derive the combined effect of ethnic diversity in both markets. We test a model that integrates the utility and production function such that the location of work and residence is determined simultaneously by taking into account observed and unobserved heterogeneous individual behavior on both markets. We find that the scale of ethnic diversity, that is the share of immigrants, at the city level is mostly positively related to both wages and house prices. This is mainly through a positive productivity effect of immigrants, which results in negative implicit prices for housing (although small) in a city with a higher scale of ethnic diversity for the majority of the individuals in our data. The scale of ethnic diversity is only positively related to utility for a small group of homeowners, while the composition (diversity among immigrants) and the consumer good-effect (ethnic diversity of restaurants) of ethnic diversity show overall no significant effect on both markets nor significant implicit prices. Moreover, we find that the majority of Dutch homeowners do not sort themselves out over municipalities by their preferences for ethnic diversity

Do Dutch Musea Compete Or Cooperate?

This paper looks into the effect of distance on market shares of Dutch museums. To this end, we assume a generic distance decay function for all museums. In addition, we allow for spatial dependence between museums to account for local competition or synergy effects. Using a unique transaction database with the visiting behavior of 80,821 museum cardholders to 108 Dutch museums, we are able to calculate market shares of each museum in all 484 Dutch municipalities. To account for possible measurement error in the market shares, we adopt a spatial two error component model. Finally, we allow for additional heterogeneity by segmenting the 108 museums using a mixture approach. Without segmenting, preliminary results indicate positive spatial dependence between museums, which points to the conclusion that -- in general -- museums benefit from each others presence

Living and Working in Ethnic Enclaves: Language Proficiency of Immigrants in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Learning English is a potentially profitable investment for immigrants in the U.S.: while there are initial costs, the subsequent benefits include the ability to communicate with the majority of the population, potentially leading to better paying jobs and economic success in the new country. These payoffs are lessened if immigrants choose to live and work in ethnic enclaves where the necessity to communicate in English is weak. Ethnic enclaves are widespread and persistent in the U.S. This study uses data from the 2010 American Community Survey to examine the impact of residential and occupational segregation on immigrants' ability to speak English. We allow for heterogeneity in the relationship between segregation and English language proficiency across ethnic groups and focus specifically on Mexican and Chinese immigrants. Our results show that immigrants in the U.S. who live and work among high concentrations of their countrymen are less likely to be proficient in English than those who are less residentially and occupationally segregated. The magnitude of the effect of segregation on language proficiency varies across immigrants' birthplaces and other salient characteristics defining the immigration context.U.S. immigration, language acquisition, ethnic enclaves, residential segregation, occupational segregation.

Barriers of culture, networks, and language in international migration: a review

Along with the increasing pace of globalization, recent decades faced a dramatically increase in international migrant flows as well. Compared to the flows of trade, capital and knowledge, we observe that contemporaneous complex institutional differences, historical backgrounds, and individuals' diverse socio-demographic characteristics make the migrant workers' choice of destination arguably much more uncontrollable. This study shows that migration is in a complex way intertwined with culture, networks and language, (i) by reviewing related studies on the barriers of culture, networks and language in international labor mobility, and (ii) by exploring missing gaps and prospective avenues for research. Nowadays, the migration pressure on Europe and the United states has created substantial challenges, leading to an urgent need to address the economic assimilation and social integration of migrants. Against this background, we emphasize that these non-economic factors have played an increasingly critical role in shaping international migration and its future socio-economic consequences for destination countries

Look Who’s Talking: On the Heterogeneous Returns to Foreign Language Use at Work among Natives and Migrants in Europe

We examine the heterogeneous impacts of foreign language use at work on earnings of both native-born workers and foreign-born workers, using a longitudinal survey, viz. the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) running from 1994 to 2001. Our findings are the following. First, for native-born workers with a tertiary diploma, using a foreign language at work is found to have an unambiguously positive impact on their earnings (2% on average). Second, for foreign-born workers, returns to foreign language use at work is highly complementary to education. Foreign language users below the upper secondary educational level earn significantly less (¡8%) than those who use the local language at work. Third, with regard to language types, a linguistically distant foreign language gives native-born workers the highest wage premium, while the use of EU official languages pays off the most for foreign-born workers. Fourth, our results do not show evidence that the lack of local language knowledge of low-educated migrants causes these results, as immigrants for whom themother tongue is similar to the local language show a similar pattern