Search results for "DEMOGRAPHY"

Winners or Losers? The Adjustment Strategies of Rural-to-Urban Migrants in Tirana, Albania

2013

This paper explores the micro-level process of adjustment undergone by rural migrants to the city. Rural migrants are expected to fully adjust to the urban lifestyle, setting aside their traditions and culture. However, as the migrant population increases in an urban area, migrants create their own communities with their own lifestyles and values, and thus there is an ongoing debate about whether this process entails the ruralisation of the city or the urbanisation of migrants. While becoming urban and being part of the city is desired, the reality is that joining a migrant community and adjusting to other migrants is more important. According to the resource-based model, migrants need pers…

Does politics matter in the conduct of fiscal policy? Political determinants of the fiscal sustainability: Evidence from seven individual Central and…

2007

This paper aims at assessing the fiscal sustainability and its political determinants in seven Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC), namely Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. First, using the recent sustainability approach of Bohn (1998) based on fiscal reaction function, econometric findings using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) reveal a positive response of the primary surplus to changes in debt in several countries. In other words, fiscal policy is sustainable in Baltic countries, Slovenia and Slovakia, but not in Poland and in the Czech Republic. Second, by introducing political dummy variables, we test the electoral budget cycle and the…

The Ambiguity of Return Migration: Prolonged Crisis and Uncertainty in the Life Strategies of Young Romanian and Latvian Returnees

2019

Contribution of the Economic Crisis to the Risk Increase of Poor Mental Health in a Region of Spain

2018

Previous research suggests that the economic crisis can affect mental health. The purpose of this study was to analyse the association of risk of poor mental health with various socioeconomic, demographic, health, quality of life, and social support variables

The effect of polytechnic reform on migration

2011

This paper examines the effect of the polytechnic reform on geographical mobility. A polytechnic, higher education reform took place in Finland in the 1990s. It gradually transformed former vocational colleges into polytechnics and also brought higher education to regions that did not have a university before. This expansion of higher education provides exogenous variation in the regional supply of higher education. The reform raised the mobility of high school graduates across local labour markets in the years after they had completed their secondary studies, which indicated increased mobility between high school and post-secondary education. We estimate that the reform enhanced the annual…

Temporary contracts and young women in Spain

2008

In this article we analyse the determinants of temporary employment through a balanced panel of workers from 1995 to 2000. First, we estimate a panel with 1267 individuals with ages ranging from 16 to 65 years. We obtain that the probability of having a temporary contract increases for people younger than 46 years old. Secondly, we estimate separately the sample of people younger than 46 years old and we obtain that the probability of temporality increases for young people with university level of education. More interestedly, the probability of being in a temporary contract is smaller for young women that for young men in Spain.

The nature of self-employment: how does gender matter?

2010

This paper analyses female and male entrepreneurship and the differences between them in Finland. The female self-employment rate is clearly lower than that of male self-employment in Finland. The paper shows that differing behaviour accounts for differing rates of self-employment between females and males. The predicted earnings differential between self-employment and paid employment has a divergent effect on the probabilities of self-employment. For males, it is positive (as expected). For females, it has no effect, which accentuates the other motives they have for self-employment. Both spouse and family are found to have bigger effects on female self-employment than on male self-employm…

Does one size fit all? The impact of cognitive skills on economic growth

2016

Les Documents de Travail de l'IREDU, n°2016-1; This paper tests for heterogeneous effects of cognitive skills on economic growth across countries. Using a new extended dataset on cognitive skills and controlling for potential endogeneity, we find that the magnitude of the effect is about 60 per cent higher for low-income countries compared to high-income countries, and it more than doubles when low TFP countries are compared to high TFP countries. There are also marked differences across geographic regions. Using data on the share of the population with advanced and minimum skill levels, our results also indicate that high-income countries should focus on increasing the number of high skill…

One swallow does not make a summer: episodes and persistence in high growth

2021

This paper analyzes firms’ episodes (spells) of high growth (HG) using a sample of Spanish manufacturing firms observed over two decades. The use of duration models allows us to investigate the following: (i) the probability of experiencing HG episodes, (ii) persistence in HG, and (iii) the determinants of the transitions in and out of the HG state and whether their impact varies over the business cycle. We find that about half of the firms experience at least one HG episode, but they seldom experience more than one. Moreover, high-growth status is rarely repeated due to high first-year selection. Yet, in subsequent years beyond the first one, the hazard rate from HG status falls substantia…

Assessing the performance of the Latin American and Caribbean banking industry: Are domestic and foreign banks so different?

2015

AbstractThis paper studies the relative performance of domestic and foreign banks in the Latin American and Caribbean banking industry. Data Envelopment Analysis is used to compute technical efficiency scores for the years 2001 and 2013. Our main contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we assess performance at the level of the management of specific production factors. On the other hand, we distinguish program efficiency from managerial efficiency, which allows us to evaluate whether the differences in technical efficiency between national and foreign banks are due to the use of different technologies (program efficiency) or, conversely, differences in the managerial capacities of manager…