Many aggregate measures of wellbeing and sustainability exist to guide policy-makers. However, the power of these aggregate measures to predict objective wellbeing outcomes has received little comparative testing. We compile and compare a range of aggregate wellbeing measures including: material...

We provide the first analysis of the short-run causal impact of immigrant inflows on native populations at the local labor market level. Using published statistics from the American Community Surveys of 2000–2010, we examine how immigrant inflow shocks to a metropolitan area affect native...

This paper analyses local labour and hosuing market adjustment in New Zealand from 1989 to 2006. We use a VAR approach to examine the adjustment of employment, employment rate, participation rate, wages, and house prices in response to employment shocks. Migration is a major adjustment response...

This paper uses data from the New Zealand Census to examine how the supply of recent migrants in particular skill groups affects the geographic mobility of the New Zealand-born and earlier migrants. We identify the impact of recent migration on mobility using the 'areaanalysis' approach, which...

Twenty-three percent of New Zealand's population is foreign-born and forty percent of migrants have arrived in the past ten years. Newly arriving migrants tend to settle in spatially concentrated areas and this is especially true in New Zealand. This paper uses census data to examine the...

New Zealand's large and volatile external migration flows generate significant year-to-year fluctuations in the demand for residential housing. This paper uses population data from the 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006 New Zealand Censuses, house sales price data from Quotable Value New Zealand...

This paper focuses on migration between Australia and New Zealand, which has exhibited a strong, but cyclical, net movement towards Australia since the late 1960s. A long-term historical perspective is taken. Trans-Tasman migration is also compared with inter-island migration within New Zealand....

We study the effect of immigration of foreign-trained, registered nurses (RNs) on the employment and wages of US-trained RNs. We use the “area” approach and study effects of immigration in labor markets defined by the state. We find substantial evidence that immigration by foreign-trained...

We study the effect of cultural ties on economic exchange using a novel measure for cultural identity: dialects. We evaluate linguistic micro-data from a unique language survey conducted between 1879 and 1888 in about 45,000 German schools. The recorded geography of dialects comprehensively...

I propose a language theory of labor market segmentation. People of different language origins form separate urban labor submarkets and can switch between submarkets. Two types of wage differentials emerge, namely the Within-Labor-Market Wage Gap and the Within-Language-Group Wage Gap. The...