James A. Dunlevy

'Who's on first': an empirical test of the Coase Theorem in baseball

Because of their highly developed skills, major league baseball players generate significant economic rents. According to the ‘weak version’ of the Coase theorem, the allocation of these players is independent of who controls the rights to these rents, which depends on the rules governing competition in the baseball labour market. The rules of Major League Baseball establish a dual system. For senior players the market is competitive, and players have the right of ‘free agency,’ allowing them to attempt to contract with the team of their choice; for players with fewer years of experience the market is monopsonistic, and a players right to play baseball is owned by his current team. Consequently, we simultaneously observe two different allocations of property rights. Using individual player data for 1979 and 1980 we test whether baseball player movement is independent of the ownership of these rents. We estimate the wage (marginal revenue) determination process for free-agent and non free agent movers and non-movers. This permits us to generate expected gains from a move for both free-agent eligible and non free-agent eligible players. Coases theorem is tested by determining if both player types, and, hence, player allocation, are equally responsive to gains from migration.

Economic Opportunity and the Responses of “Old” and “New” Migrants to the United States

The hostile and patronizing attitudes of native Americans toward the increasing number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the century raise a number of issues that bear on the history of U.S. immigration policy and on other matters. Utilizing Zellners SUR technique, a model of settlement patterns of ten immigrant nationalities is estimated, and the appropriate F-statistics are generated to test several of these issues: (1) Did “new” immigrants behave as purposefully as contemporaneous “old” migrants from northwestern Europe? (2) Did they react as did the old migrants to a variety of socioeconomic factors? (3) Were the new migrants more dependent on the cultural support of earlier migrated countrymen? The findings indicate diverse, but purposeful, behavior within both the new and the old migrant groups with few systematic differences between them.

Orthogonal Least Squares and the Interchangeability of Alternative Proxy Variables in the Social Sciences

This paper adapts some existing large and small sample techniques to the problem of orthogonal least squares inference. Making use of the equivalence among the slopes of the major axis, the first principal component, and the orthogonal least squares regression line of a bivariate normal population, and noting that the eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix are functions of the orthogonal least squares slope estimator permit a straightforward application both of large and small sample confidence interval procedures developed by Jolicoeur and of a large sample hypothesis testing procedure of Anderson. A small sample hypothesis test on the orthogonal least squares slope estimator, which modifies Jolicoeurs confidence interval procedure, is also presented. Application of these methods to the question of empirical interchangeability of alternative proxy variables in regression analysis is illustrated with numerical examples.

Net Migration, Endogenous Incomes and the Speed of Adjustment to the North-South Differential

The model of net migration is developed in the next section. In section III the model is used to estimate the net flow of heterogeneous labor over the 1965 to 1970 period between the northern and southern regions of the United States. Forty-eight age-education-race specific categories of labor constitute the observation set. The estimates of the net migration function are then used with the relationship developed in section IV to obtain a measure of the speed for each labor category at which the long-run North-South income disparity was being eliminated. The estimates obtained indicate that migration systematically induced by interregional income differences does operate to close the income differential but that the process is quite slow for every demographic category considered. (excerpt)

Migrant stock vs. lagged migrant flow as a determinant of migrant settlement

In a recent contribution to this Journal Anjomani and Hariri present an interesting study of United States interstate migration which explicitly incorporates so-called “flow diversion” and “flow creation” effects. Their discussion and evaluation of the model, however, are marred by several factors. This paper contrasts the roles of migrant stock and lagged migration in migration analysis and then addresses (a) the problems encountered when the “family-friends” effect is proxied with measures of lagged migrant flows, (b) the problem of using a two-period lagged value of earlier migrant flow as an explanatory variable, and (c) this paper suggests an alternative method of correcting the Anjomani-Hariri models problems with multicollinearity.

Foreign finance, wealth effects and economic development

In this paper a two-period model of the wealth effect of foreign capital flows on domestic investment in LDCs is developed. It is shown that the link between foreign capital flows and increases in domestic consumption is conditional on the productivity of the capital flow, repayment conditions and complementarity with domestic investment. Generalizations are made regarding the relative productivity and repayment terms of such broad categories of capital flows as unrequited transfers, direct investments and long-term flows to governments. The impact of variations in the terms on which foreign capital is received is related to the ‘wealth effect’ of the capital. The model is tested with pooled cross-section data for seventy countries in 1976 and 1977. Data limitations permit estimation of the effect of foreign finance on domestic investment only up to a monotonic transformation of the true values. Nevertheless, the hypothesized role of the wealth effect of the major categories of external finance can be tes...

From Ellis Island to JFK. New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration. By Nancy Foner. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press; and New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. Pp. x, 334.

In this impressive study of American immigration Nancy Foner presents an “interpretive synthesis†that “brings together strands from the mass of literature on past and present immigration†(p. 4). She argues that the historical and contemporary literatures have developed separately and that there is virtue in bringing them together. Here the historical period covers 1880 to 1920, and the contemporary period begins in the mid-1960s. Of necessity, Foner selects a narrow and manageable range of topics to review. Geographically, Foner limits her coverage to New York City, the “quintessential immigrant city.†In terms of immigrant groups, for the earlier period Foner considers only the experiences of Italians and of Russian Jews, who dominated that immigration; for the later period, in which no two national groups are so dominant, she emphasizes the experiences of West Indians, Asian Indians, Chinese, and Korean immigrants. The chapters consider who the immigrants were, where they lived, the work they did (with a separate chapter on immigrant women and their work), the dynamics of race and prejudice, the maintenance of transnational ties, and the role of schooling.

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Abstract The settlement patterns within the United States of Scandinavian migrants have been carefully examined by Vedder and Gallaway. 1 Relying primarily on decennial United States census data for the period 1850 to 1960, they employed multiple regression techniques to explain the distribution for each census year of Scandinavian-born persons across the various states. Their results suggest that Scandinavian emigrants, regardless of nationality, reacted to a variety of economic and social forces in a manner consistent with the theory of the utility-maximizing household. They also observe a similarity of response across the four immigrant groups to the explanatory variables.