IMMIGRATION,WAGES, AND COMPOSITIONAL AMENITIES

There is strong public opposition to increased immigration throughout Europe. Given the modest economic impacts of immigration estimated in most studies, the depth of anti‐immigrant sentiment is puzzling. Immigration, however, does not just affect wages and taxes. It also changes the composition of the local population, threatening the compositional amenities that natives derive from their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. In this paper we use a simple latent‐factor model, combined with data for 21 countries from the 2002 European Social Survey (ESS), to measure the relative importance of economic and compositional concerns in driving opinions about immigration policy. The ESS included a unique battery of questions on the labor market and social impacts of immigration, as well as on the desirability of increasing or reducing immigrant inflows. We find that compositional concerns are 2–5 times more important in explaining variation in individual attitudes toward immigration policy than concerns over wages and taxes. Likewise, most of the difference in opinion between more‐ and less‐educated respondents is attributable to heightened compositional concerns among people with lower education.     

RETHINKING THE EFFECT OF IMMIGRATION ON WAGES

This paper calculates the effects of immigration on the wages of native US workers of various skill levels in two steps. In the first step we use labor demand functions to estimate the elasticity of substitution across different groups of workers. Second, we use the underlying production structure and the estimated elasticities to calculate the total wage effects of immigration in the long run. We emphasize that a production function framework is needed to combine own‐group effects with cross‐group effects in order to obtain the total wage effects for each native group. In order to obtain a parsimonious representation of elasticities that can be estimated with available data, we adopt alternative nested‐CES models and let the data select the preferred specification. New to this paper is the estimate of the substitutability between natives and immigrants of similar education and experience levels. In the data‐preferred model, there is a small but significant degree of imperfect substitutability between natives and immigrants which, when combined with the other estimated elasticities, implies that in the period from 1990 to 2006 immigration had a small effect on the wages of native workers with no high school degree (between 0.6% and +1.7%). It also had a small positive effect on average native wages (+0.6%) and a substantial negative effect (−6.7%) on wages of previous immigrants in the long run.     

OIL AND THE MACROECONOMY: A QUANTITATIVE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

We model an open economy where macroeconomic variables fluctuate in response to oil supply shocks, as well as aggregate demand and supply shocks generated domestically and abroad. We use several robust predictions of the model to identify five fundamental shocks underlying the fluctuations of the (real) oil price, the US activity and the global business cycle. The estimates show that supply shocks generated in the global economy explain the largest fraction of the oil price fluctuations, about four times more than canonical oil supply shocks. The correlation between oil prices and the US activity varies with the type of shock.     

BOOK TRANSLATIONS AS IDEA FLOWS: THE EFFECTS OF THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM ON THE DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE

We use book translations as a new measure of international idea flows and study the effects of Communism's collapse in Eastern Europe on these flows. Using novel data on 800,000 translations and difference‐in‐differences approaches, we show that while translations between Communist languages decreased by two thirds with the collapse, Western‐to‐Communist translations increased by a factor of 4 and quickly converged to Western levels. Convergence was more pronounced in the fields of applied and social sciences, and was more complete in Satellite and Baltic than in Soviet countries. We discuss how these patterns help us understand how repressive institutions and preferences towards Western European ideas shaped the international diffusion of knowledge.     

TRADE QUOTAS AND BUYER POWER,WITH AN APPLICATION TO THE E.U. NATURAL GAS MARKET

We consider a market in which domestic buyers negotiate contracts with foreign sellers, and explore how trade quotas can help to increase the buyers' countervailing power. We use the Shapley value to describe bargaining power and the distribution of the trade surplus in such a bilateral oligopoly. By exploiting strategic externalities among the buyers, bilateral trade quotas can improve the buyers' bargaining positions. In contrast, aggregate trade restrictions on all buyers' trade never improve buyer surplus. Minimum quotas on imports from fringe suppliers can benefit nonaffected buyers, as these enjoy positive externalities. We apply these insights to the E.U. market for natural gas and show that the effects of trade quotas on E.U. gas importers' power can be significant.     

以国土空间布局的优化推进“十四五”区域协调发展和新型城镇化

“十四五”时期是开启社会主义现代化建设新征程的关键阶段,从空间布局、制度创新和城市发展等层面,对“十四五”时期中国构建高质量的区域协调发展与新型城镇化体系进行研究。研究认为,在空间布局层面,需要以因地制宜的区域重大战略为引导,进一步实施区域协调发展战略,实施做强、做精重点开发区与保护限制开发区、禁止开发区的主体功能区战略,构建起高质量发展的国土空间布局和支撑体系; 在制度创新层面,通过健全市场一体化发展机制、深化区域合作新机制和建立面向现代化的区域政策调控机制,以现代化制度创新驱动区域协调发展; 在城市发展层面,通过提升城市人的现代化,打造城市经济现代化和现代化的城市基础设施,规划科学的城市群结构,建设中心城市与城市群基础设施、要素之间的共建共享与自由流动机制,建设以人为核心的新型城镇化。     

Gender bias in performance evaluations: The impact of gender quotas

The intention behind imposing quotas for women on corporate boards is to close the gender gap in economic participation and help women to be promoted within organizations. However, the broader social psychological literature lends support to ideas that affirmative action policies, such as quotas, may do more harm than good for the beneficiaries. We extend this idea beyond the affected beneficiaries and ask whether this unintended negative effect spills over to women who are not immediate targets of the quota, by signaling incompetence. We develop an experimental design to investigate whether the announcement (study 1) and the implementation (study 2) of a quota for women have a direct negative effect on performance evaluations and hence reinforce the existing gender bias in evaluation. We observed that the performance of women was evaluated significantly lower than that of men. However, this gender bias was limited to sequential (rating) evaluations and was not evident in joint (ranking) evaluations. The quota did not significantly influence the amount of this bias. In addition, we observed more pronounced sexism in males compared to females. Results of study 2 gave a hint to an association between higher sexism and lower evaluations of women’s performance. We also found some evidence for a stronger evaluation bias in females when controlling for sexist attitudes. Hence, our results imply that the bias, which is overall quite robust and strongly pronounced, is still affected by individual gender-related characteristics.     

基于DSP和LabVIEW的多通道数据采集系统的设计

系统使用飞思卡尔的DSP56F807代替了数据采集卡,使用CodeWarrior软件的PE软件包开发DSP,通过串口通讯将其与NI公司的LabVIEW软件相结合,使用LabVIEW软件处理数据,从而实现了被测系统多通道数据的采集。实验证明,此系统工作迅速可靠。     

THE POWER AND SIZE OF NONPARAMETRIC TESTS FOR COMMON DISTRIBUTIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

This paper considers the power and size properties of some well known nonparametric linear rank tests for location and scale as well as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov omnibus test and proposed alternatives to it. Independence between some classes of linear rank tests is established facilitating their joint application. Monte Carlo study confirms the asymptotic power properties of the linear rank tests but raises concerns about their application in more general and practically relevant circumstances. It also indicates that the new omnibus tests constitute viable alternatives with superior properties to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test in certain circumstances.     

Ordered ranked set samples and applications to inference

Ranked set sampling (RSS) was first proposed by McIntyre [1952. A method for unbiased selective sampling, using ranked sets. Australian J. Agricultural Res. 3, 385–390] as an effective way to estimate the unknown population mean. Chuiv and Sinha [1998. On some aspects of ranked set sampling in parametric estimation. In: Balakrishnan, N., Rao, C.R. (Eds.), Handbook of Statistics, vol. 17. Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 337–377] and Chen et al. [2004. Ranked Set Sampling—Theory and Application. Lecture Notes in Statistics, vol. 176. Springer, New York] have provided excellent surveys of RSS and various inferential results based on RSS. In this paper, we use the idea of order statistics from independent and non-identically distributed (INID) random variables to propose ordered ranked set sampling (ORSS) and then develop optimal linear inference based on ORSS. We determine the best linear unbiased estimators based on ORSS (BLUE-ORSS) and show that they are more efficient than BLUE-RSS for the two-parameter exponential, normal and logistic distributions. Although this is not the case for the one-parameter exponential distribution, the relative efficiency of the BLUE-ORSS (to BLUE-RSS) is very close to 1. Furthermore, we compare both BLUE-ORSS and BLUE-RSS with the BLUE based on order statistics from a simple random sample (BLUE-OS). We show that BLUE-ORSS is uniformly better than BLUE-OS, while BLUE-RSS is not as efficient as BLUE-OS for small sample sizes (n<5$n<5$).