We analyze the early U.S. economic achievement of former Soviet citizens entering the United States during the period 1979 through 1985. Using the Soviet Interview project (SIP) data, we identify components of human capital acquired in the former Soviet Union (FSU), relating these to labor force...

We examine how the source of foreign aid affects the composition of the recipient government's spending. Does the source of aid - bilateral or miltilateral - influence ricipient policy-makers' choice between development and nondevelopment expenditure? We depart from previous literature by...

This paper proposes a method for evaluating the impact of tax reform on tax revenues and the distribution of the tax burden. The technique consists of decomposing actual revenue relative to potential revenue into components attributable to (i) changes in the tax rate structure (ii) deductions...

In a corrupt tax administration a rise in tax rate sets about complicated strategic moves by both taxpayers and administrators. It is shown that in some circumstances, this may bring about a Laffer like behavior of overall tax revenue, i.e. a higher tax rate results in smaller net revenue for...

In this paper we assess the impact of external economic liberalization in India on the transmission of aggregate shocks. We examine the relative importance of domestic and external shocks and capture their feedback effects by estimating an eight variable vector autoregression (VAR) model. We...

Our argument is that the importance of parent's schooling and female share of employment on children's schooling will vary by gender, ethnicity and economic system. We examine this issue across Germany, Hungary and the former Soviet Union. Our results indicate that there is a direct effect of...

This paper analyzes the determinants and timing of return migration. Special attention is given to the role of social and informational migration networks. A simple theoretical model of temporary migration demonstrates that the effect of migration networks on optimal migration duration is...

The speed at which immigrants assimilate is the subject of debate. Human capital formation plays a major role in this discussion. This paper compares the educational attainment of second generation immigrants to those of natives in the same age cohort. Evidence using a large German data set...

Recent studies exploring sibling rivalry in the allocation of household resources in the U.S. produce conflicting results. We contribute to this discussion by addressing the role of sibling rivalry in educational attainment in Germany. Using the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) we are able to...

Migration networks are usually captured by the number of people from the migrant's country in the host region. Using Mexican migration data, we analyze the effects of the usual network variable and two additional origin-village-specific variables on migrants' location choice.