Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This paper studies the effect of occupational licensing on the education-occupation mismatches and the logarithm of hourly wages of natives and immigrants in the United States using longitudinal data from the 2014 sample of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). On average, licensing reduces the skills mismatch and raises hourly wages among natives but not among immigrants. Over time there is only minimal convergence between the outcomes experienced by licensed natives and immigrants, highlighting that licensing does not produce uniform benefits, by immigrant status. Rather, it appears to institutionalize substantive differences in the quality of the skill matches and hourly pay of native and immigrant licensed workers and professionals.

This article studies whether migration policy is a suitable tool to improve the inefficient use of immigrants' human capital. This line of investigation complements the traditional analysis of migration policy as a tool to manage labor supply. The effect of migration policy is studied, using a policy change that occurred in Australia in the late 1990s that tightened the selection applied to certain economic immigrants. The empirical analysis, based on data collected by the Longitudinal Survey of Migrants to Australia, confirms that the policy change raised, on average, the human capital of the affected group. It also, however, consistently reveals that the change had no detectable impact on indicators measuring immigrants' skill utilization. This result suggests that migration policy, by itself, may not be best suited to address issues related to the efficient use of foreign talent in the labor market. Better coordination with employment policy may alleviate this problem. Additional research on migration policy's effect on efficiency-related issues is also called for.

AbstractThis article analyses 20 years of bilateral peoples' flows between Italy and Australia using a unique set of data collected by Australia's Department of Immigration and Citizenship. This period has witnessed substantial changes in the composition of migration between the two countries. Against a historical background where migration is mostly composed of unskilled Italians relocating to Australia, the past two decades have seen a progressive increase in the arrival of young and highly skilled/qualified Italians on a short‐term basis. Conversely, there has been an increase in older Australians moving to or visiting Italy for work. Such changes have affected the bilateral skill flows, whose relevance has increased as globalization forces have made international transport easier and cheaper. Australia remains a "magnet" for Italians, and, unlike the historical origin of Italy's early immigrants, it now enjoys a net inflow of highly skilled labour.

This paper analyses the impact of a change in Australia's immigration policy, introduced on 1st July 1999, on migrants' probability of being over-/under-educated or correctly matched. The policy change consists of stricter entry requirements about age, language ability, education, and work experience. The results indicate that those who entered under more stringent conditions - the second cohort - have a lower probability to be overeducated and a correspondingly higher probability of being better matched than those in the first cohort. The policy change appears to have reduced the incidence of over-education among women, enhanced the relevance of being educated in Australia to be correctly matched, and attracted a higher proportion of immigrants that were already under-utilised (or over-achieving) in their home countries. Overall, the policy appears to have brought immigrants that reduced the over-under-education of Australia's labour market.

This paper presents new data on international work-related visits collected from a survey of about 2,000 people traveling to/from Australia. Visits emerge as the prime medium for face-to-face interactions to exchange knowledge rather than as a substitute for migration. Exchanging knowledge through visits is strong among outgoing visitors but statistically insignificant among incoming ones, implying that benefits to Australia's knowledge stock are more likely to come from the former rather than the latter. Governments and universities use visits to exchange information and data. In contrast, Australian small- and medium-size enterprises are more likely to exchange knowledge related to operative competences, like product development, manufacturing and distribution.

AbstractEconomic models typically study the long‐term effects of migration, and hence emphasise their impact on a country's endowment of skills using net migration rates. This approach however does not take into account the contribution of short‐term movements of skilled labour on a country's stock of knowledge and ability to innovate. This paper develops a theoretical approach to extend the analysis to gross migration flows, which captures the volume of interactions and the potential for knowledge exchanges between a country's skilled labour and workers living elsewhere. One implication of the approach developed is that higher growth can be achieved through higher international labour mobility, even if there is no net migration. Countries that find it difficult or impossible to attract skilled labour on a permanent basis may therefore enjoy the growth effect brought by skilled temporary migrants.

This paper presents the results of a survey of international business travelers to and from Australia carried out at Sydney Airport in May 2003 to understand the motivations underlying business travel. Data gathered from a sample of 210 business travelers indicate that knowledge sharing is a very common motivation to undertake a business trip while boosting sales is the least common. Business trips emerge as a mechanism to access, develop and transfer knowledge internationally, and possibly affect a country's ability to innovate.

This paper investigates whether foreign labour cushions native employment during the phases of the economic cycle. The theoretical model, based on the work of Blanchard and Katz (1992), assumes that foreigners supply labour with a higher wage elasticity than natives. The empirical analysis, based on a panel of 161 European regions during 1988-1997, shows that following a labour demand shock the variability of native employment growth is lower the higher the proportion of foreign citizens in the local labour force. These results suggest that foreigners absorb some of the effects of the shock, shielding natives from its full impact.