Hubert Jayet

On the Law of Return in Rural–Urban Interactions: An Economic Approach to Solidarity with Return Migrants

Community solidarity with return migrants is commonly observed in the rural areas of developing countries. In this paper, we briefly review the evidence from sociological studies on this issue and suggest a new economic approach to such solidarity. We show that an implicit institutional arrangement, whereby migrants have no obligations (e.g., no obligation to remit) but may nevertheless enjoy equal ownership rights on collective resources upon return, enhances economic efficiency via an optimal regulation of migration flows. We also address enforceability issues since, within each generation, time consistency problems may give rise to opportunistic behavior among non-migrants.

Migration and Development: New Insights

This editorial introduction presents the papers published in this special issue of Annals of Economics and Statistics, which is the outcome of the first Migration and Development conference organized by EQUIPPE at the Faculte des Sciences Juridiques, Politiques et Sociales, Universite Lille 2.

OPTIMAL IMMIGRATION POLICY: WHEN THE PUBLIC GOOD IS RIVAL

In this model, we characterize optimal immigration and fiscal policies in presence of a rival public good and heterogeneous discounting. Surprisingly, even if the government is benevolent towards natives only, it is optimal to keep borders open. Indeed, in the long run, patient natives hold the whole stock of capital, while impatient immigrants work. Moreover, since capital intensity is stationary, capital per native, consumption and the public good increase with the number of (immigrant) workers. This positive effect offsets the disutility deriving from the congestion of the public good. Howevern when we account for the costs associated to cultural heterogeneity, we find that it is optimal to regulate immigration inflows. We also interpret the long-run sensitivity of the optimal policy mix with respect to the fundamentals.

Endougenous Amenities and the Spatial Structure of Cities

This paper examines the endogenous dynamics of the social structure of a city where the spatial repartition of amenities is endogenously modified by the spatial repartition of social groups. We start from the well known fact that, in most European cities, central locations are occupied by rich households; while in American cities, they are occupied by poor households. In a standard urban model without amenities, for rich households to locate downtown, their unit transport cost must be very high compared to the poor. Bruckner and lii (1999) show that, when there are historical amenities mainly located in the city center, we no longer need a high differential between transport costs: if demand for amenities by the rich is strong enough, this advantage could attract the rich households in the city centre. This explanation fits well with the fact that the most European cities have a long history, with the consequence that they accumulated many amenities in their city centre. However, the paper by Brueckner and alii is purely static and does not explicitly consider the historical dimension of the process generating amenities. Our model explicitly takes account of time: at every period, the equilibrium spatial structure of the city is determined by the transport costs and by the spatial repartition of amenities; but, between periods, the spatial repartition of amenities changes, rich households generating local amenities in the locations they occupy, and then the spatial structure of the city changes. We show that with endogenous generation of local amenities, when the city develops, it may move from an American equilibrium to an European one. If the city starts without amenities, poor households locate in the city centre, rich households in the periphery. However, the production of new local amenities by the rich generates a lock in effect: rich go on occupying locations where they were living previously and, as the city develops, these locations become central ones

A Note on Tax Competition and Leviathan

The central purpose of this paper is to determine the effect of interjurisdictional competition for capital on public decisions of Leviathan-type policymakers who are also concerned with re-election. We show that the supply of public goods is (in)efficient in a Nash-equilibrium when such policy-makers (do not) use freely their tax instruments. Moreover, tax instruments choices depend on the assumption concerning capital ownership. When the local stock of capital is owned by residents, policy-makers are not likely to use the tax on capital while absentee ownership leads them to use it as tax exporting allows them to increase their rents