Immigrant-Native Differences in Welfare Participation: The Role of Entry and Exit Rates This paper analyzes differences in welfare transitions between natives and immigrants in Sweden using a large representative panel data set, LINDA, for the years 1991 to 2001. The data contains administrative information on welfare use, country of birth, and time of arrival in Sweden among other things, and ...

We investigate second generation migrants and native children at several stages in the German education system to analyze the determinants of the persistent native-migrant gap. One part of the gap can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic background and another part remains unexplained. Faced with this decomposition problem, we apply linear and matching decomposition methods. Accounting...

The Politicians’ Wage Gap: Insights from German Members of Parliament Using a unique dataset of German members of parliament with information on total earnings including outside income, this paper analyzes the politicians’ wage gap (PWG). After controlling for observable characteristics as well as accounting for selection into politics, we find a positive PWG which is statistically and economic...

We perform a dynamic general equilibrium analysis of the observed increase in the weight of the average American adult over the 1960-2005 period. Existing evidence suggests that this fifteen pound increase in weight can be attributed to the dramatic raise in the consumption of foods prepared away from home, which resulted in higher caloric intake. We evaluate the impact of the observed trends i...

This paper studies the labor market in Vietnam during the transition towards market economy (1993-2006): we show that the public-private sector wage gap markedly increased, but that wage inequality decreased overall. Our aim is to assess how much of this evolution can be explained by workers’ productive skills and their allocation between sectors. We use a simple, yet innovative, method that al...

In this paper, the relationship between labor-market segmentation and the gender wage gap is analyzed with data from the 1998 Swiss Wage Structure Survey. It is shown that in three selected industries (health-care industry, catering industry, banking and insurance industry) the unexplained and potentially discriminatory gender wage differential is substantially larger in the primary than in the...

Article history: Received 8 August 2012 Received in revised form 18 June 2014 Accepted 1 July 2014 Available online 9 July 2014 This paper examines how stock market liquidity and commonality in liquidity are impacted by real-time output gap and inflation, as these macroeconomic variables have been shown to be the main drivers of monetary policy according to the Taylor rule. We show that an incr...

This paper develops a quality ladder model in which the technology gap between the North and the South is endogenously determined. Foreign direct investments (FDI) occur cyclically: New FDI arrives if and only if the technology gap reaches some threshold. A stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) in the South discourages imitation and reduces the FDI cycle length. A smaller market size and ...

The observed patterns of equity portfolio allocation around the world are at odds with predictions from a capital asset pricing model (CAPM). What has come to be called the “home-bias” phenomenon is that investors tend to hold a disproportionately large share of their equity portfolio in home country stocks as compared with predictions of the CAPM. This paper provides an explanation of the home...

Was the Mandal Commission Right? Living Standard Differences between Backward Classes and Other Social Groups in India Affirmative action has been at the heart of public policies towards the socially disadvantaged in India. Compensatory discrimination policies which have been adopted for the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) since independence were recommended for Other Backward C...