Links: 23rd July. Special Focus: Emigration.

1. Adam Jaffe: Building Program Evaluation Into The Design Of Public Research Support Programs

2. NSF Survey of Federal Funds for Research and Development

3. Greg Mankiw discusses the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers' "impossible job": measuring how many jobs were created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Here's a link to the CEA document.

4. Marginal Revolution flags a recent paper by Weber and Castillo from Yahoo! Research: The Demographics of Web Search. "How does the web search behavior of 'rich' and 'poor' people differ? Do men and women tend to click on different results for the same query?"

5. David McWilliams on emigration out of Ireland: "The ESRI predicts that 120,000 will leave the country in the next 18 months, on top of the 100,000 who have already gone in the past 18 months."

6. It was last year that the CSO reported that for the first time since 1995 more people left Ireland than moved here. That is, there was net outward migration.

7. Overall, the ESRI commentary warns that 200,000 people may be forced to emigrate between now and 2015 if unemployment does not abate.

8. In addition, a new Eurobarometer survey shows more than one fifth of Irish people are thinking of moving abroad for work. It also shows that 35% of Irish people feel employment prospects are better in other countries.

9. This Irish Times article states that current statistics show "Irish people are moving to both Canada and Australia in increasing numbers to escape the economic recession but are largely shunning traditional emigration routes to Britain and the US."

10. A companion article by the same journalist (Jamie Smyth) considers whether time abroad could end up as permanent emigration: "...if the Irish economy does not rebound in the next few years and create job opportunities for the next generation of graduates and school-leavers it seems very likely that a year spent working abroad will lead to longer term and more permanent emigration." To quote an old Pogues song, (hundreds of) thousands are "sailing".

Links: 19th July 2010

1. "Avoiding a Lost Generation: How to Minimize the Impact of the Great Recession on Young Workers": Testimony before Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress on May 26th, 2010. By James Sherk: Senior Policy Analyst in Labor Economics at the The Heritage Foundation.

2. "The Kids Aren’t Alright — A Labor Market Analysis of Young Workers": Kathryn Anne Edwards and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez (Economic Policy Institute): EPI Briefing Paper #258, April 7, 2010.

3. The Browne Review (or the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance) is a panel which will consider the future direction of higher education funding in England. It was launched on the 9 November 2009 and is being chaired by Lord Browne of Madingley, the former chief executive of BP. Wikipedia provides additional information.

4. "Policy Watch: Income-Contingent College Loans": Alan B. Krueger and William G. Bowen, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 193-201

5. ESRI Higher Education Policy Conference: "Higher Education Policy: Evidence from Ireland and Europe". Venue: The ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2. Date: 16/11/2010.

6. David Willetts MP, the UK universities minister: "If You Can't Get a Job, Start a Business", Guardian: 16th July 2010.

7. On a lighter note, one for Dr. Kev: "Irishmen prefer to be single, survey shows". "Lee-Ann Burke, a lecturer in economics at University College Cork , said the study contradicts other surveys showing men happier being married."

8. Google Offers OCR: when you import files into Google Docs (JPEG, GIF, PNG, or PDF) you have the option of running optical character recognition on them.

9. The Turbulence Ahead blog got a makeover.

10. Finally, here's a video of Pete Lunn (ESRI) speaking at the Irish Economics and Psychology event last November, on "A Computational Theory of Exchange". Thanks to Karl Deeter for organising the video; if you follow this link, you will see other talks from the event by Marcel Das, Stephen Kinsella and Jonathan Murphy.

Assorted Links

1. Last week Obama unveiled a $14 billion plan to help troubled homeowners

2. Need cash in a hurry. Don't worry; you can get it here, within 15 minutes. Only in the UK.

3. Leisure College, USA

4. Human Behavior and Economics: A Survey of Recent Literature, 1914

5. An analysis of the Graduate Labour Market in Finland: the impact of Spatial Agglomeration and Skill-Job Mismatches

6. Linguistic Elitism and Gender in the Irish Labour Market: How much Advantage is there to Workers in Ireland Speaking Irish and being Male? Evidence from the 2006 Census

7. College fee regime to change in US

8. Identity Economics and Life Reconstruction

Grades

1. How are college-grades determined? The economics literature points towards a simple answer: "by spending more time on study". I don't provide links here, but for evidence on the positive relationship between study-time and grades, see Arulampalam, Naylor and Smith (2007), Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (2007) and Martins and Walker (2006). Dustmann and Van Soest (2007) show that part-time employment while in school has a negative effect on males' exam performance. Kalenkoski and Pabilonia (2010), DeSimone (2008), Joensen (2007), Oettinger (2005), Van Dyke et al. (2005), Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (2003) and Ehrenberg (1987) all provide evidence that working (to varying degrees) while in college has a harmful effect on grades.

2. Why do students care about their grades? Again, I don't provide links here, but for evidence on the positive relationship between college grades and subsequent earnings, see McIntosh (2006), Loury and Garman (1995), Jones and Jackson (1990), Filer (1983) and Wise (1975).

3. What about grade inflation? Some economists are concerned about its interaction with the signalling model of labour market earnings. Others extend this concern to how social background may end up as a driver of labour market sorting.

4. However, grade inflation is hard to measure. In the paper 'More For Less or Less for More?', Geraint Johnes (Lancaster) and Robert McNabb (Cardiff) emphasise that studies of grade inflation have not distinguished between the effects of declining standards and increasing efficiency. "Yet both of these phenomena can plausibly explain an improvement in measured performance of educational institutions over time." Johnes and McNabb propose a method whereby competing effects can be disentangled. Their findings suggest that there has been no decline in standards in the UK university sector during the last decade. Efficiency, meanwhile, has risen steadily over the last 25 years.

5. It is also worth bearing in mind that sometimes universities split into high-grading and low-grading departments. Sabit and Wakeman-Linn (Journal of Economic Perspectives, albeit as far back as 1991) discuss the situation in the United States: "Economics, along with Chemistry and Math, tends to be low-grading. Art, English, Philosophy, Psychology and Political Science tends to be high-grading." Interestingly, it appears that there are higher returns to more harshly marked disciplines; see "Ability Sorting and the Returns to College Major" (Arcidiacono, Journal of Econometrics, 2003). "Large monetary premiums exist for choosing natural science and business majors even after controlling for selection."

A Few More Links

1. Do happy people have fewer heart attacks?

2. Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee on the importance of "the first job after graduation": NYT 2006

3. This week's U.S. jobs measure: payroll tax exemption, and tax breaks for capital expenditure

4. CIRGE: the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education

5. Panel Conditioning and Attrition in the AP-Yahoo! News Election Panel Study

6. Tomorrow's edition of The Economist runs with the following lead-story: "The Data Deluge - and How To Handle It"

7. Job Opportunities at Yahoo!: the tech giant recently advertised for Ph.D. graduates in Microeconomics

The 'Incidence' and 'Wage Effects' of Mismatch among Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Graduates

A new ESRI working paper by Delma Byrne and Seamus McGuinness looks at mismatch in the graduate labour market among immigrants and second-generation ethnic minority groups. As in other studies of a similar nature (some of which have been discussed on this blog before: Bender and Heywood; 2006 (and Robst; 2007); Nordin/Persson/Rooth; 2008; Budria and Moro-Egido; 2004), the focus is to estimate the incidence and wage effects of over-education and overskilling.

In the Byrne and McGuinness paper, the graduates come from UK universities. The results show that immigrant and second-generation ethnic minority graduates are no more likely to experience education or skill mismatch relative to their native counterparts. Furthermore, graduates from immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds incur overeducation and overskilling wage penalties that lie well below the level incurred by native graduates.