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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
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Issue of 2024‒03‒25
five papers chosen by |
| By: | Akay, Alpaslan; Bargain, Olivier; Jara Tamayo, H. Xavier |
| Abstract: | Subjective well-being (SWB) data are increasingly used to perform welfare analysis. Interpreted as “experienced utility”, it has recently been compared to “decision utility” using small-scale experiments most often based on stated preferences. We transpose this comparison to the framework of non-experimental and large-scale data commonly used for policy analysis, focusing on the income–leisure domain where redistributive policies operate. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we suggest a “deviation” measure, which is simply the difference between actual working hours and SWB-maximizing hours. We show that about three-quarters of individuals make decisions that are not inconsistent with maximizing their SWB. We discuss the potential channels that explain the lack of optimization when deviations are significantly large. We find proxies for a number of individual and external constraints, and show that constraints alone can explain more than half of the deviations. In our context, deviations partly reflect the inability of the revealed preference approach to account for labor market rigidities, so the actual and SWB-maximizing hours should be used in a complementary manner. The suggested approach based on our deviation metric could help identify labor market frictions. |
| Keywords: | decision utility; experienced utility; labor supply; subjective well-being |
| JEL: | C90 I31 J22 |
| Date: | 2023–10–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:117746&r=ltv |
| By: | Shahe Emran, M.; Ferreira, Francisco; Jiang, Yajing; Sun, Yan |
| Abstract: | We extend the Becker-Tomes model to a rural economy with farm-nonfarm occupational dualism to study intergenerational educational mobility in rural China and India. Using data free of coresidency bias, we find that fathers’ nonfarm occupation and education were complementary in determining sons schooling in India, but separable in China. Sons faced lower mobility in India irrespective of fathers’ occupation. Sensitivity analysis using the Altonji et al. (J. Polit. Econ. 113(1), 151–84, 2005) approach suggests that genetic correlations alone could explain the intergenerational persistence in China, but not in India. Farm-nonfarm differences in returns to education, and geographic mobility are plausible mechanisms behind the contrasting cross-country evidence. |
| Keywords: | educational mobility; rural economy; occupational dualism; farm-nonfarm; complementarity; coresidency bias; China; India; This project was partially funded by World Bank RSB.; Springer deal |
| JEL: | O12 J62 |
| Date: | 2023–11–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:120490&r=ltv |
| By: | Baum, Christopher F.; Lööf, Hans; Stephan, Andreas; Zimmermann, Klaus F. |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the wage earnings of fully-employed previous refugee immigrants in Sweden. Using administrative employer-employee data from 1990 onwards, about 100, 000 refugee immigrants who arrived between 1980 and 1996 and were granted asylum, are compared to a matched sample of native-born workers. Employing recentered influence function (RIF) quantile regressions to wage earnings for the period 2011-2015, the occupational-task-based Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition approach shows that refugees perform better than natives at the median wage, controlling for individual and firm characteristics. This overperformance is due to female refugee immigrants, who have-relative to their endowment-higher wages than comparable native-born female peers up to the 8th decile of the wage distribution. Given their endowments, refugee immigrant females perform better than native females across all occupational tasks studied, including non-routine cognitive tasks. A remarkable similarity exists in the relative wage distributions among various refugee groups, suggesting that cultural differences and the length of time spent in the host country do not significantly affect their labor market performance. |
| Keywords: | refugees, wage earnings gap, occupational sorting, employer-employee data, correlated random effects model, Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition |
| JEL: | C23 F22 J24 J6 O15 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1400&r=ltv |
| By: | Alison Andrew; Orazio Attanasio; Britta Augsburg; Lina Cardona-Sosa; Monimalika Day; Michele Giannola; Sally Grantham-McGregor; Pamela Jervis; Costas Meghir; Marta Rubio-Codina |
| Abstract: | Early childhood interventions aim to promote skill acquisition and poverty reduction. While their short-term success is well established, research on longer-term effectiveness is scarce, particularly in LDCs. We present results of a randomized scalable intervention in India, that affected developmental outcomes in the short-term, including cognition (0.36 SD p=0.005), receptive language (0.26 SD p=0.03) and expressive language (0.21 SD p=0.03). After 4.5 years, when the children were on average 7.5 years old, IQ was no longer affected, but impacts persisted relative to the control group in numeracy (0.330 SD, p=0.007) and literacy (0.272 SD, p=0.064) driven by the most disadvantaged. |
| JEL: | I25 I30 I38 J13 O15 |
| Date: | 2024–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32165&r=ltv |
| By: | Alan Manning |
| Abstract: | Those who believe in a more open, liberal approach to immigration often frame their argument as being on the side of 'good economics' versus 'bad politics'. Alan Manning explains why the arguments presented as 'good economics' are often unconvincing; those on this side of the argument really need to up their game. |
| Keywords: | immigration, uk economy |
| Date: | 2024–02–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepcnp:676&r=ltv |