Economic Journal最新文献

We take advantage of the expansion of the French High-speed Rail to study the impact of decreases in communication costs in the form of lower travel times between headquarters and affiliated plants of corporate groups. We show that such shocks foster the functional specialisation of remote affiliates on their production activities. Support activities shrink because of the transfer of high-skilled managers to headquarters. These organisational rationalisations have a significant but small impact on overall profit. Our results hold across all industries but are strongest in services where the information to be transmitted across sites is arguably softer.

We exploit a unique event in human history, the exodus of the Vietnamese Boat People to the US, to provide evidence for the causal pro-trade effect of migrants. This episode represents an ideal natural experiment as the large immigration shock, the first wave of which comprised refugees exogenously allocated across the US, occurred over a 20-year period during which time the US imposed a complete trade embargo on Vietnam. Following the lifting of trade restrictions in 1994, US exports to Vietnam grew most in US states with larger Vietnamese populations, themselves the result of larger refugee inflows 20 years earlier.

While measured remittances by migrant workers have recently soared, macroeconomic studies have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth. We propose three new explanations for this puzzle. First, a large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances may be illusory – arising from changes in measurement. Second, cross-country regressions may lack power to detect such growth effects. Third, remittances rise primarily with rising emigration, whose opportunity cost to GDP creates endogeneity bias. Migration and remittances clearly have first-order effects on poverty, migrant households’ welfare and global GDP but detecting the effect of remittances on economic growth faces important challenges.

The diffusion of tacit knowledge involves direct human interactions. This implies that the international diffusion of knowledge should follow the pattern of international migration. We test this idea using cross-country productivity spillovers leading to new exports as proxy for knowledge diffusion. We find that a 10% increase in immigration from exporters of a given product is associated with a 2% increase in the likelihood that the host country starts exporting that good ‘from scratch’ in the next decade. The results appear stronger for highly-skilled migrants, qualitatively similar for emigrants and robust to instrumenting for migration in a gravity framework.

We study the prevalence and traits of global collaborative patents for US public companies, where the inventor team is located both within and outside of the US. Collaborative patents are frequently observed when a corporation is entering into a new foreign region for innovative work, especially in settings where intellectual property protection is weak. We also connect collaborative patents to the ethnic composition of the firm's US inventors and cross-border mobility of inventors within the firm. The inventor team composition has important consequences for how the new knowledge is exploited within and outside of the firm.

The paths of many migrants include multiple destinations and transit routes, yet this pattern is almost never reflected in empirical analyses. For example, 9% of recent immigrants to the US arrived from a transit country as opposed to the one they were born in. Among those arriving from many OECD countries, transit migration ratio exceeds 30%. To explain these patterns, we construct a dynamic model of global migration that allows transit migration opportunities to impact the attractiveness of locations. After estimating structural parameters of the model, we simulate various counterfactual scenarios to highlight the spillovers of transit migration paths.

We employ equality of opportunity (EOP) definitions from the literature on distributive justice to a quantitative model featuring intergenerational human capital investments and luck. When calibrated to the US, the model-implied degree of EOP differs substantially depending on whether one considers it ethical to reward offspring for the effort of previous generations. Despite reducing intragenerational inequality, education subsidies do little to promote EOP. This is because if one thinks intergenerational investments should be rewarded, there is little room for improvement to begin with; in the opposite case, much stronger redistribution is needed for the policies to have a quantitative impact.

Equality of opportunity is widely endorsed but subject to conflicting interpretations. This article identifies four non-equivalent interpretations of the equality of opportunity ideal. Under scrutiny, all are contestable. The suggestion is broached that equality opportunity norms are best regarded as, in some circumstances, means to further justice goals, never rather as in themselves morally desirable.