1,721,011 research outputs found
Temporary/Permanent Workers' Wage Gap: A Brand-new Form of Wage Inequality?
No full textBy easing restrictions on the use of short-term contracts, the 30/2003 act represents contemporaneously the more extensive and the more radical policy aimed at introducing flexibility in the Italian labour market. By virtue of a difference-in-differences estimator, the paper provides an estimate of the impact of the 30/2003 reform on the wage gap across fixed-term and long-term employees. It will be given evidence that the policy has widened the wage differentials and the effect is particularly stronger to skilled workers compared with unskilled workers. These findings would suggest the existence of a possible brand-new form of wage inequality. Copyright 2010 CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Migration, diversity, and economic growth
Full text linkWhen migrants move from one country to another, they carry a new range of skills and perspectives, which nurture technological innovation and stimulate economic growth. At the same time, increased heterogeneity may undermine social cohesion, create coordination, and communication barriers, and adversely affect economic development. In this article we investigate the extent to which cultural diversity affects economic growth and whether this relation depends on the level of development of a country. We use novel data on bilateral migration stocks, that is the number of people living and working outside the countries of their birth over the period 1960–2010, and compute indices of fractionalization and polarization. In so doing, we explore the effect of immigration on development through its effect on the composition of the destination country. We find that overall both indices have a distinct positive impact on real GDP per capita and that the effect of diversity seems to be more consistent in developing countries
Replication Data for: UN peacekeeping and households' well-being in civil wars
No full textThis data release contains the datasets and do-files to replicate the analysis in the paper and in the Appendi
Replication Data for: UN Peacekeeping and Households' Well-Being in Civil Wars
No full textCivil wars affect the economic conditions of households by disrupting economic transactions and harming their psychological well-being. To restore basic conditions for local economic recovery in conflict-torn regions, the international community has only a limited number of tools at its disposal. We ask whether UN peacekeeping is one instrument to mitigate the negative effect of conflict on households' economic well-being. We argue that, by reducing violence and heightening perceptions of safety, UN missions (i) encourage labour provision and economic exchanges, and (ii) instill confidence by reducing the psychological impact of daily stressors. Combining high-frequency household survey data and information on subnational deployment of UN peacekeepers in South Sudan, we show that peacekeepers military presence improves security (observed and perceived), which in turn revitalize local economies and households' subjective well-being. These improvements ultimately boost households' consumption, partially countering the negative effect of ongoing civil wars by keeping local communities' economy afloat
The impact of American and British involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq on health spending, military spending and economic growth
Full text linkHad there been no involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, how much lower would military and health spending have been in the US and the UK? And what is the total effect of war on real output variations as compared with its counterfactual? We use a synthetic control method and find that while the UK and the US have experienced similar relative increases in health spending, especially towards the end of the 10-year window, the effect on military spending is much more pronounced in the US. We find that the combined cumulative costs amount to more than 17% of the US GDP and more than 9% of the UK GDP. Moreover, there are no robust signs of a convergence between the true and counterfactual levels of military spending while health spending shows a level shift in the last 5 years in both countries. Finally, there is no evidence of changes in the national income following the sharp increase in defense spending.JRC.DDG.01 - Econometrics and applied statistic
Informal work in a flexible labour market
Full text linkInformal employment is a pervasive and persistent feature of most developing and developed economies. Labour taxation and labour market regulations are deemed two major causes for operating in the informal sector. Using data from France, Italy, and Spain, we analyse gross job flows and gross worker flows in the formal and informal sectors in the presence of lenient employment protection legislation, and investigate the way traditional policy interventions may favour transitions from one sector to the other. We show that optimal outcomes in terms of reduction and formalisation of informal jobs across the three countries examined are achieved with the combination of lower payroll taxes for permanent contracts and higher inspection rate for firms operating in the informal sector. Coupling lower firing costs with more frequent labour inspections also reduces informality, but this comes at the cost of an increased ratio of temporary to total employment
Synthesis report on the ‘Pilot projects to carry out ESF related counterfactual impact evaluations’
No full textIn order to measure the causal effect of a policy, a specific approach called ‘counterfactual impact evaluation’ is needed. This report highlights that data access, networking, capacity building and taking evaluation requirements into account during the policy implementation are key for shifting to a culture of causal evaluation of policies.These results derive from eight pilot projects funded by DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion to foster themeasurement of causal effects of European Social Fund policie
Drugs and violence in Afghanistan : a panel VAR with unobserved common factor analysis
Full text linkThis paper addresses the relationship between the level of violence and the opium market in Afghanistan’s provinces. We first provide an overview of the nature and extent of the Afghan drug trafficking. This is followed by a vector autoregressive analysis of the nexus opium-insurgency activities using monthly time-series data on opium prices and the number of security incidents for 15 Afghan provinces over the period 2004–2009. We use a multifactor error structure, the common correlated effect, to include unobservable common factors; Impulse Response functions to describe the time path of the dependent variables in response to shocks; and the mean group estimator to summarize our results across the provinces. Results suggest a conflict-induced reduction in opium prices, while the reverse opium-violence mechanism is mostly negligible. Moreover, unobservable common factors are the main drivers of opium prices and violence
Immigration, fear of crime and public spending on security
No full textWe explore the relation between immigration, crime, and local government spending on security in Italian municipalities. We find that immigration increases the share of public resources devoted to police protection, particularly when migrants are culturally distant from the native population. We uncover a misalignment between perception and reality, as immigration is associated to fear of future crimes rather than the actual probability of being victim of a crime. We also demonstrate that immigration from culturally distant societies corresponds to a deterioration in civic cooperation and interpersonal trust, which can affect perceptions of safety and the demand for police services
Economic Development in Peacekeeping Host Countries
Full text linkTo what extent does United Nations peacekeeping assist in laying the foundations for economic development? We conduct the first exploratory analysis of the effect of peace operations on the economic development of the host countries. We highlight the need for new inferential methods to reveal the extent to which robust conclusions about the success of missions can be drawn. We then apply synthetic control methods to 11 peace operations deployed since the end of the Cold War. Our results suggest that, in seven cases, peacekeeping does not seem to significantly affect economic rehabilitation. In two of the remaining four cases, the impact is negative rather than positive, pointing to persistent hurdles to identification
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