Should the US have locked heaven��s door?

This paper examines the economic impact of the second great immigration wave (1945–2000) on the US economy. Our analysis relies on a computable general equilibrium model combining the major interactions between immigrants and natives (labor market impact, fiscal impact, capital deepening, endogenous education, endogenous inequality). Contrary to recent studies, we show that immigration induced important net gains and small redistributive effects among natives. According to our simulations, the postwar US immigration is beneficial for all natives cohorts and all skill groups. Nevertheless, the gains would have been larger if the US had conducted a more selective immigration policy.     

On the Processes Underlying the Relationship Between Alexithymia and Gambling Severity

A great number of individuals with persistent problematic gambling behavior exhibit alexithymic tendencies, greater impulsivity, impaired working memory and poor mood. However, the relationship between these cognitive, affective and personality factors in problem gambling remains poorly understood. Our aim was to investigate multiple pathways of the alexithymia and problem gambling relationship. One hundred and six male subjects with different levels of gambling problem severity were recruited. Alexithymia, impulsivity and verbal working memory were evaluated, and their relationships to disordered gambling was examined by means of a path analysis. Results indicate that alexithymia is related to an increase in the severity of gambling indirectly, i.e., through distress severity. In addition, a rise of alexithymic tendencies was also associated with problem gambling severity through enhanced impulsivity that directly increased distress. Working memory capacity failed to significantly impact our path model. Overall, our findings contribute a new finding to the literature by highlighting the importance of alexithymia, in addition to impulsivity, in the understanding of gambling problem severity and its clinical course.     

Putting measures of individual well-being to use for ex-ante policy evaluation

Most studies using microsimulation techniques have considered the effect of potential reforms on the income distribution. However, it has become increasingly recognized, both at the academic and political level, that focusing purely on income provides a limited picture of social progress. We illustrate how ex-ante policy evaluation can be performed in terms of richer concepts of individual well-being, such as subjective life satisfaction and equivalent incomes. Our analysis makes use of EUROMOD, the EU-wide tax-benefit microsimulation model, along with 2013 EU-SILC data for Sweden, which for the first time provides information on life satisfaction. Our results show that the effect of potential reforms varies widely depending on the well-being concept used in the evaluation. We discuss the normative questions that are raised by this finding.     

Impaired Metacognitive Capacities in Individuals with Problem Gambling

Impaired insight into behavior may be one of the clinical characteristics of pathological gambling. In the present study, we tested whether the capacity to evaluate accurately the quality of one’s own decisions during a non-gambling task was impaired in problem gamblers. Twenty-five problem gamblers and 25 matched healthy participants performed an artificial grammar-learning paradigm, in which the quality of choice remains uncertain throughout the task. After each trial of this task, participants had to indicate how confident they were in the grammaticality judgements using a scale ranging from 1 (low confidence) to 7 (high confidence). Results showed that (i), problem gamblers’ performance on the grammaticality test was lower than controls’; (ii) there was a significant correlation between grammaticality judgments and confidence for control participants, which indicates metacognitive insight and the presence of conscious knowledge; (iii) this correlation was not significant in problem gamblers, which suggests a disconnection between performance and confidence in this group. These findings suggest that problem gamblers are impaired in their metacognitive abilities on a non-gambling task, which suggests that compulsive gambling is associated with poor insight as a general factor. Clinical interventions tailored to improve metacognition in gambling could be a fruitful avenue of research in order to prevent pathological gambling.     

Tying the Acquirer's Human Resource Management Quality to Cross‐Border Acquisition Divestment Probability: Curvilinear Connection with Slacklining

Cross‐border acquisitions are growing in volume and global economic importance, yet a considerable number end in failure. Many of these failures may be linked to people management‐related issues. We extend this stream of research by investigating the impact of the acquirer's aggregate human resource management (HRM) quality on cross‐border acquisition divestment. Our empirical analysis uses a panel database of 4128 cross‐border acquisition/year observations and an event history design. The findings confirm a curvilinear relationship and suggest that acquisition failures are not merely associated with poor HRM quality, but also with very high levels of HRM quality, that is, with both extremes. Moreover, our results show that financial slack has a significant moderating effect on the curvilinear relationship between HRM quality and the likelihood of acquisition divestment. Overall, our study reveals boundary conditions for the widely demonstrated positive relationship between HRM quality and organizational performance in an acquisition context.     

Work Incentives at the Extensive and Intensive Margin in Europe: The Role of Taxes,Benefits and Population Characteristics

Social Indicators Research - Tax and benefit systems play an important role in determining work incentives at both the extensive and the intensive margin of labour supply. The aim of this paper is...