JOURNAL OF POPULATION ECONOMICS

Germany (Heidelberg) 89

1996 - VOLUME 9, NUMBER 1

97.89.1 - English - John BROOME, Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, 9 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1TB (U.K.) (E-mail : John. Broome@bristol.ac.uk)

The value of life and the value of population (p. 3-18)

This paper first distinguishes structured and unstructured approaches to valuing life. The unstructured approach bases its valuation on people's raw preferences, whereas the structured approach imposes a theoretical framework about the structure of value. The paper recommends the structured approach. This open the way to considering the value of adding people to the population. The paper examines a common intuition that adding people is not in itself valuable, and explains the difficulties this intuition encounters. (LIFE, POPULATION, EVALUATION, PHILOSOPHY)

97.89.2 - English - Barry R. CHISWICK, University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Economics (M/C 144), 601 S. Morgan Street, Room 2103, Chicago, IL 60607-7121 (U.S.A.), and Paul W. MILLER, University of Western Australia, Department of Economics, Nedlands, Western Australia (Australia)

Ethnic networks and language proficiency among immigrants (p. 19-35)

Recent research on the linguistic adjustment of minority-language speaking immigrants in several destinations has found that acquisition of destination language skills is inhibited by living in an area where many others speak the same minority language. This paper uses a unique data set for Australia (1988) that includes a variety of ethnic network variables to analyze the role of the language concentration measure. These ethnic variables, in particular, ethnic press, relatives in Australia, and spouse's origin language, are highly statistically significant. Their inclusion in the equation eliminates the effect of the minority-Ianguage concentration variable. The model for analysing the determinants of English reading and English writing skills in Australia is also shown to be very similar to the model for speaking fluency, including the effect of the ethnic network variables. (AUSTRALIA, MIGRANT ASSIMILATION, MOTHER TONGUE, NATURAL LANGUAGE, LANGUAGE MINORITIES, SOCIAL ORGANIZATION)

97.89.3 - English - Christian DUSTMANN, Department of Economics, University College London, Gower Street, Londres WC1E 6BT (U.K.)

The social assimilation of immigrants (p. 37-54)

Although there is some considerable empirical research on the economic assimilation of migrants to the labor markets of the host countries, little or no analysis exists on the social assimilation and integration of migrant workers. This is surprising since the integration of migrants is not only of political importance, but it should strongly interact with their economic behaviour. This paper provides an empirical analysis of the determinants of migrant's integration, using data for Germany. Ordered probit models are estimated, where the dependent variable is an ordered response on the feeling of national identity. The results show that personal characteristics, the nationality and the family context affect the migrant's integration, while labor market variables appear to be quite unimportant. (GERMANY, MIGRANT ASSIMILATION, INTEGRATION, MIGRANT WORKERS)

97.89.4 - English - Alan BARRETT, The Economic and Social Research Institute, 4 Burlington Road, Dublin 4 (Ireland)

Did the decline continue? Comparing the labor-market quality of United States immigrants from the late 1970's and late 1980's (p. 55-63)

The issue addressed in this paper is whether or not the decline in immigrant labor-market quality in the U.S. observed in the late 1960's and 1970's continued in the 1980's. Two other papers, Borjas (1995) and Funkhouser and Trejo (1995), have addressed the issue and have come up with contradictory results. In this paper I use a different data set, one that has advantages over the data sets used in the other studies. Given the rise in earnings inequality that has occurred in the United States over the 1980's, the returns to immigration for the more highly skilled will have increased relative to the low skilled, ceteris paribus. For this reason, it is possible that the skill decline of immigrants may have halted in the 1980's as immigrants of differing skill levels respond to the altered circumstances they would face in the United States. The empirical results show that the skill decline did indeed halt, a result which gives support to the Funkhouser/Trejo result. (UNITED STATES, IMMIGRANT WORKERS, LABOUR MARKET, OCCUPATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS)

97.89.5 - English - Gabriella A. BUCCI, Department of Economics, DePaul University, 1 E. Jackson Blvd, Chicago, IL 60604 (U.S.A.), and Rafael TENORIO, Department of Finance and Business Economics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556 (U.S.A.)

On financing the internal enforcement of illegal immigration policies (p. 65-81)

We introduce a government budget constraint into an illegal immigration model, and show that the effect of increasing internal enforcement of immigration laws on the host country's disposable national income depends on the mix of employer fines and income taxation used to finance the added enforcement. These issues are addressed under alternative assumptions about (a) the ability of host country employers to discern between legal and illegal workers, and (b) host country labor market conditions. Empirical evidence for the United States indicates that the employer sanctions program may have had a negative impact on disposable national income. (UNITED STATES, IMMIGRANT WORKERS, ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, GOVERNMENT POLICY, FINANCING, NATIONAL INCOME)

97.89.6 - English - Elise S. BREZIS, Department of Economics, Bar-Ilan University, 52900 Ramat Gan (Israel), and Paul R. KRUGMAN, Department of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 (U.S.A.)

Immigration, investment, and real wages (p. 83-93)

When a country is the recipient of large-scale, politically motivated immigration -- as has been the case for Israel in recent years -- the initial impact is to reduce real wages. Over the longer term, however, the endogenous response of investment, together with increasing returns, may well actually increase real earnings.

Waves of immigration often present considerable short-run economic difficulties, leading to some mix of upward pressure on unemployment and downward pressure on real wages. Nonetheless, over the longer run it is arguable that immigration not only brings considerable benefits, it may well tend to raise real wages. The problem is one of getting through the transition.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a simple model that is suggestive of the mix of difficulties and opportunity presented by large-scale immigration. It shows why immigration may well have a negative effect on real wages in the short-run but a positive effect in the long-run. It also suggests the possibility that the outcome of waves of immigration is not predetermined: the question of whether the immigrants are successfully absorbed may depend crucially on both policy and expectations. (ECONOMIC DEMOGRAPHY, IMMIGRANT WORKERS, WAGES, INVESTMENTS, ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS)

97.89.7 - English - Philippe MICHEL, GRECAM-LEQUAM, Château La Farge, Route des Milles, F-13390 Les Milles (France), Anne PERROT, CEME, Université de Paris I-Sorbonne, 12 place du Panthéon, F-75243 Paris Cedex 05 (France), and Jacques-François THISSE, CERAS-ENPC, 28, rue des Saints-Pères, F-75543 Paris Cedex 07 (France)

Interregional equilibrium with heterogeneous labor (p. 95-113)

The impact of labor migration on interregional equilibrium is studied when workers are heterogeneous in productivity and regional mobility. The skilled respond to market disequilibrium by moving into the most attractive region. The unskilled are immobile in the short-run and move with the skilled in the long-run. Both regions have a neoclassical production function affected by an externality depending on the number of skilled. Workers move according to the utility differential when regional amenities vary with population or according to the wage differential. The equilibrium pattern depends on the unskilled's mobility and on migration incentives. Typically, regional imbalance characterizes the equilibrium which is often suboptimal. (ECONOMIC DEMOGRAPHY, THEORETICAL MODELS, LABOUR MOBILITY, REGIONS, OCCUPATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS)

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