4,095 research outputs found
Review of: Globalization, employment and income distribution in developing countries, by Lee, E. and Vivarelli, M.
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Educational policies in a long-run perspective
No full textIn this paper we study the effects of educational reforms on school attainment. We construct a dataset of relevant reforms that occurred at the national level over the last century, and match individual information from 24 European countries to the most likely set-up faced when individual educational choices were undertaken. Our identification strategy relies on temporal and geographical variations in the institutional arrangements, controlling for time/country fixed effects, as well as for country specific time trend. By characterizing each group of reforms for their impact on mean years of education, educational inequality and intergenerational persistence, we show an ideal policy menu which has been available to policymakers. We distinguish between groups of policies that are either 'inclusive' or 'selective', depending on their diminishing or augmenting impact on inequality and persistence. Finally, we correlate these reform measures to political coalitions prevailing in parliament, finding support for the idea that left-wing parties support reforms that are inclusive, while right-wing parties prefer selective ones
Trade openness and the demand for skills: evidence from Turkish microdata
No full textIn this paper we report evidence on the relationship between trade openness, technology adoption and relative demand for skilled labour in the Turkish manufacturing sector, using firm-level data over the period 1980-2001. In a dynamic panel data setting using a unique database of 17,462 firms, we estimate an augmented cost share equation whereby the wage bill share of skilled workers in a given firm is related to international exposure and technology adoption. Overall, results suggest that trade openness and technology play a key role in shifting the demand for labour towards more skilled workers within each firm. Technology-related variables (domestic R&D expenditures and technological transfer from abroad) are positive and significantly related to skill upgrading, as are the involvement of foreign capital in a firm's ownership and the propensity to export. Moreover, firms belonging to those sectors that most raised their imported inputs also experienced a higher increase in the labour cost share of skilled workers. This finding is consistent with the idea that imports by a middle-income country imply a transfer of new technologies that are more skill-intensive than those previously in use in domestic markets. This idea is reinforced by the finding that only imported inputs from industrialised countries - where the potential for innovation diffusion comes from - enter the estimated regression significantly
"Castellani, D. and Zanfei, A. (2006): Multinational Firms, Innovation and Productivity”
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The Effect of Immigrant Peers in Vocational Schools
No full textThis paper provides new evidence on how the presence of immigrant peers in the classroom affects native student achievement. The analysis is based on longitudinal administrative data on two cohorts of vocational training students in Italy's largest region. Vocational training institutions provide the ideal setting for studying these effects because they attract not only disproportionately high shares of immigrants but also the lowest ability native students. We adopt a value added model, and exploit within-school variation both within and across cohorts for identification. Our results show small negative average effects on maths test scores that are larger for low ability native students, strongly non-linear and only observable in classes with a high (top 20%) immigrant concentration. These outcomes are driven by classes with a high average linguistic distance between immigrants and natives, with no apparent role played by ethnic diversity
Trade and income inequality in developing countries
No full textWe use a dynamic specification to estimate the impact of trade on within-country income inequality in a sample of 65 developing countries (DCs) over the 1980-1999 period. Our results suggest that trade with high income countries worsen income distribution in DCs, both through imports and exports. These findings provide support to the hypothesis that technological differentials and the skill biased nature of new technologies may be important factors in shaping the distributive effects of trade. Moreover, we observe that the previous results only hold for middle income countries (MICs); we interpret this evidence by considering the greater potential for technological upgrading in MICs
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