Expanding transnational care networks: comparing caring for families with caring for homes

Although many factors may motivate a migrant to own a house in their country of origin, significant practical labour is needed to maintain it, as both a material structure intended for shelter and as a symbolic object reflecting attachment to a place of origin. Most research in this area focuses on the significance accorded to transnational houses by their owners and families connoted by the ‘myth of return’, but little attention has been given to how the labour of ownership – constructing, maintaining, overseeing and improving the house – is accomplished. In the light of emerging studies on the care labour that remittance houses require, this article suggests a theoretical framework for studying networks of transnational house maintenance on three dimensions of care – trust, communication, and remittances – observed in networks for transnational family care provisions. A review of literature on transnational home ownership indicates that these dimensions are also present, with some differences in application.     

INCENTIVES AND BEHAVIOR IN ENGLISH, DUTCH AND SEALED-BID AUCTIONS

The Pareto optimality and price behavior of English and Dutch oral auctions, and First-Price and Second-Price sealedbid auctions are compared under various procedures for assigning valuations among cash motivated bidders. The Vickrey propositions with respect to the mean and variance of prices under the English, Dutch and Second-Price auctions are not falsified by the data. Individual behavior and prices in the First-Price auction deviates considerably from Vickrey's Nash postulate. Behaviorly, the English and Second-Price auctions appear to be isomorphic, but the Dutch and First-Price auctions may not be isomorphic.     

KNOWLEDGE CAPITAL,INTERNATIONAL TRADE,AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT: A SECTORAL ANALYSIS

The knowledge‐capital (KC) model of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is now a widely adopted empirical approach to explain the location and production decisions of global firms based on both horizontal and vertical motivations. Although most of the existing studies have focused on highly aggregated national data, we extend this model to sectoral data consisting of broad manufacturing industries and explicitly account for the dynamic nature of international investment data. The empirical results from a dynamic panel data analysis indicate that the predictions of the KC model regarding MNE behavior vary by the type of industry. Production processes in electronics and transportation equipment are more characterized by efficient vertical specialization of research and development activities and assembly, whereas other sectors display more complex motivations. (JEL F14, F23, L23)