Alessandra Casarico

Social security and migration with endogenous skill upgrading

Abstract The aim of the paper is to investigate the joint redistributive effects of migration and pensions and to reassess the sustainability issue raised in the existing economic literature. The paper first develops a theoretical framework to analyse the impact of international migration on the labour market. The model allows for heterogeneity across native-born individuals and for migrants to affect both the wages and the education decision in the recipient country. It then explicitly focuses on pensions under alternative migration scenarios. The analysis shows that migration causes redistributive effects which increase across-group wage inequality. However, the endogenous educational response by residents partially offsets the redistributive impact of migration while creating additional interest groups. Migration helps the financial sustainability of the pension scheme but the interaction between migration and pensions causes complex inter- and intragenerational redistributive conflicts, which are analysed in the paper.

Pension systems in integrated capital markets

Abstract The paper studies the effects on factor prices and welfare of the integration in a perfect world capital market of countries that differ in the degree of funding of their pension systems. It focuses on two large economies running respectively a pay-as-you-go and a fully funded pension system and it first analyzes the open economy implications of the different pension designs under the assumption that the pay-as-you-go system is balanced and in steady state equilibrium. It then elaborates on the institutional structure of the pay-as-you-go system to analyze how its degree of maturity, its expenditure profile and the presence of debt financing affect factor prices and welfare in open economy. Finally, it focuses on pension reform issues. The paper shows that, under perfect capital mobility, the differences in the degree of funding of the pension systems cause divergent welfare effects across generations and across countries. It shows that the design features of the pay-as-you-go scheme play a role in the world equilibrium and it identifies which of them can amplify or reduce the open economy linkages operating through the pension schemes.

Pension Reform and Economic Performance under Imperfect Capital Markets

The author considers an overlapping generations model where heterogeneous agents take decisions on consumption and investment in education under the assumption of imperfect capital markets. She studies how the introduction of a pay-as-you-go and of a fully funded pension scheme affects output and lifetime opportunities and then analyzes the impact of a pension reform. The standard neutrality result for fully funded pension schemes does not hold in this framework. The author establishes the conditions under which a fully funded scheme is associated with a higher investment in human capital. She shows that the transition path may involve poverty traps.

International Migration, Human Capital Formation, and the Setting of Migration-Control Policies: Mapping the Gains

Recent research has identified conditions under which migration of human capital (skilled workers) from a developing (sending) country to a developed (receiving) country enhances human capital formation and improves wellbeing within the sending country (Mountford, 1997; Stark, Helmenstein, and Prskawetz, 1997, 1998; Stark and Wang, 2002; Fan and Stark, 2007; Stark and Fan, 2007, 2008). In contrast to earlier writings on the brain drain (for example, Patinkin, 1968; Bhagwati and Wilson, 1989), the recent contributions cast migration as a harbinger of human capital gain rather than a cause of human capital drain.

An Optimal Selective Migration Policy in the Absence of Symmetric Information, and in the Presence of Skill Formation Incentives

In this chapter we study the selection policy of incoming migrant workers when the receiving country’s own welfare guides the formation of policies, when selection is made under asymmetric information, and when workers differ in terms of their level of human capital. Informational asymmetry arises when employers in the receiving country (in contrast to employers in the sending country) cannot decipher the true skill level of individual workers (who, however, know well their own skill levels). Selection is achieved via levying a proportional tax on migrants’ earnings. (An equivalent way of conceptualizing the selection tool is to think of it as an entry fee to be paid in the form of a tax on earnings.1) We calculate the optimal tax when human capital is fixed — ‘a fixed human capital framework’ — and in the presence of a human capital formation incentive — ‘an adjustable human capital framework’.

Spending More is Spending Less: Policy Dilemmas on Irregular Migration

We study the migration policy set by a welfare maximizing government in a model where immigrant workers differ in their skills and are imperfectly matched with heterogenous occupations. The policy fixes a minimum skill level for legal migrants, and foreign workers that fall below it can only enter the country illegally. We start by analyzing under which conditions an amnesty is desirable compared to tolerating undocumented immigrants. Next, we study when it is preferable to have ex-ante lax enforcement, rather than to carry out costly enforcement. We show that three channels play an important role in this decision: an amnesty is more likely the larger are the output gains brought about by the legalization, the less redistributive is the welfare state and the higher is the expected cost of criminal activities carried out by illegal immigrants. Importantly, we also find that, when an amnesty is desirable, the destination country would reach an even higher welfare level investing in enforcement ex-ante. Empirical evidence based on a novel panel dataset of legalization programs carried out by a group of OECD countries between 1980-2007 broadly supports the role played by the channels identified in our theoretical model.

Top Incomes and the Gender Divide

In the recent research on top incomes, there has been little discussion of gender. How many of the top 1 and 10 per cent are women? A great deal is known about gender differentials in earnings, but how far does this carry over to the distribution of total incomes, bringing selfemployment and capital income into the picture? We investigate the gender divide at the top of the income distribution using tax record data for a sample of eight countries with individual taxation. We show that women are under-represented at the top of the distribution. They account for between a fifth and a third of those in the top 10 per cent. Higher up the income distribution, the proportion is lower, with women constituting between 14 and 22 per cent of the top 1 per cent. The presence of women in the top income groups has generally increased over time, but the rise becomes smaller at the very top. As a result, the gradient with income has become more marked: the under-representation of women today increases more sharply. Examination of the shape of the income distribution by fitting a Pareto distribution shows that at the end of the period women disappear faster than men as one moves up the income scale in all countries. In this sense, there appears to be something of a “glass ceiling” for women. In the case of Canada, Denmark, Norway and New Zealand, there appears to have been a reversal over time, with the slope of the upper tail having been steeper for women in the past. In seeking to explain this, we highlight the role of income composition, where we show that there have been significant changes over time, underlining the fact that it is not sufficient to look only at earned income.

Great Expectations: The Determinants of Female University Enrolment in Europe

We empirically investigate the determinants of the female decision of investing in post-secondary education, focusing on the role played by the context where young women take their education decision. We first develop a stylized two-period model to analyze the female decision of investing in education and highlight two main determinants: the time to be devoted to child care and the probability of working in a skilled job. We then use data on educational decisions of women in the 17-21 age group drawn from EU-Silc, available for the years 2004-2008. From the same survey we construct context indicators at the regional level, and exploit regional variability to identify how womenís educational investment reacts to changes in the surrounding context. We find that the share of working women with children below 5 and the share of women with managerial positions or self-employed positively affect the probability that women enrol in post-secondary education. The same does not hold for men.

The Duties of the Sovereign: A Brief Guide to the Literature

In this paper we address the following four questions: is it reasonably correct to assume that the government is benevolent and competent? Has state intervention through taxation and transfers negative effects on individual incentives? In a context of limited information, are political failures or market failures more relevant? Which macroeconomic model is more useful for policy analysis? We tackle the above issues by surveying and discussing the main contributions in the literature on the above topics and we draw some lessons on the appropriate role of public intervention in the economy.

A Critical Comparison of Migration Policies: Entry Fee Versus Quota

We ask which migration policy a developed country will choose when its objective is to attain the optimal skill composition of the country’s workforce, and when the policy menu consists of an entry fee and a quota. We compare these two policies under the assumptions that individuals are heterogeneous in their skill level as well as in their skill type, and that individuals of one skill type, say “scientists,�? confer a positive externality on overall productivity whereas individuals of the other skill type, say “managers,�? do not confer such an externality. We find that a uniform entry fee encourages self-selection such that the migrants are only or mostly highly skilled managers. The (near) absence of migrant scientists has a negative effect on the productivity of the country’s workforce. Under a quota: the migrants are (a) only averagely skilled managers if the productivity externality generated by the scientists is weak, or (b) only averagely skilled scientists if the productivity externality generated by the scientists is strong. In (a), a uniform entry fee is preferable to a quota. In (b), a quota is preferable to a uniform entry fee. If, however, the entry fee for scientists is sufficiently below the entry fee for managers, then migrants will be only or mostly highly skilled scientists, rendering a differentiated entry fee preferable to a quota even when the productivity externality is strong. Instituting a differentiated fee comes, though, at a cost: the fee revenue is not as high as it will be when migrants are only or mostly managers. We conclude that if maximizing the revenue from the entry fee is not the primary objective of the developed country, then a differentiated entry fee is the preferred policy.