During the diploma's ceremony for the Faculty of Economics, the USI Career & Alumni Service is glad to invite you to the presentation of the Career Story LIVE of: Patrizia Holzborn April 24, 2017 - 5pm Aula Magna - Campus Lugano Patrizia Holzborn, USI Alumni, Laurea quadriennale in Scienze economiche ...
During the diploma's ceremony for the Faculty of Economics, the USI Career & Alumni Service is glad to invite you to the presentation of the Career Story LIVE of: Claudia Von Gunten April 24, 2017 - 5pm Aula Magna - Campus Lugano Claudia Von Gunten, USI Alumni, Master in International Tourism ...
We document that U.S. employment polarization in the 1980-2008 period is largely generated by women. Female employment shares increase both at the bottom and at the top of the skill distribution, generating the typical U-shape polarization graph, while male employment shares decrease in a more similar fashion along the whole skill distribution. We show that a canonical model of skill-biased technological change augmented with a gender dimension, an endogenous market/home labor choice and a multi-sector environment accounts well for gender and overall employment polarization. The model also accounts for the absence of employment polarization during the 1960- 1980 period and broadly reproduces the different evolution of employment shares across decades during the 1980-2008 period. The faster growth of skill-biased technological change since the 1980s accounts for most of the employment polarization generated by the model.
We measure the "new" gains from trade reaped by Canada as a result of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA). We think of the "new" gains from trade of a country as all welfare effects pertaining to changes in the set of firms serving that country as emphasized in the so-called "new" trade literature. To this end, we first develop an exact decomposition of the gains from trade which separates "traditional" and "new" gains. We then apply this decomposition using Canadian and US micro data and and that the "new" welfare effects of CUSFTA on Canada were negative.
As in most OECD countries, smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption have been decreasing in Germany since the early 2000s. This paper analyses whether smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption, as well as their development over time, differ between socio-economic subgroups. Identifying these differences provides insights into the effect of policy interventions on German smoking behaviour. Based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), a large longitudinal study of the German population, we find that both the decline in smoking prevalence and the decline in average cigarette consumption were probably driven by a behavioural change of younger people, as well as of those with a high educational level and those with a high income. People who quit smoking were on average more highly educated, had a higher income and had most likely a lower cigarette consumption (before quitting). In contrast, smoking prevalence increased among people who were older than 45 and had a low educational level and among those who were unemployed. Smoking prevalence among women was relatively constant over time. Indeed, the smoking prevalence of women and men converged over time, especially in older age groups. Daily cigarette consumption of smokers increased among 66-to-75-year-olds, although it decreased in all other age groups. One explanation might be that the tobacco control measures were successful only in certain socio-economic subgroups. Not only smoking prevalence, but also smoking intensity was higher among men, among those with a lower educational level and among those with a lower income. Especially for younger birth cohorts, smoking prevalence among those with a lower educational level was particularly high. Thus, based on data from 1998 through 2014, the so-called social gradient in smoking was only a distinct feature of younger birth cohorts, and not of older ones.
It is shown that the equilibrium in the asymmetric Tullock contest is unique for parameter values r ≤ 2. This allows proving a revenue ranking result saying that a revenue-maximizing designer capable of biasing the contest always prefers a contest technology with higher accuracy.
It is shown that the n-player lottery contest admits a best-response potential (Voorneveld, 2000, Economics Letters). This is true also when the contest technology reflects the possibility of a draw. The result implies, in particular, the existence of a non-trivial two-player zero-sum game that is best-response equivalent to a game with identical payoff functions.
Worldwide, an estimated 200 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital cutting. Female genital cutting is defined as an intentional injury to the female genitalia without medical justification. The practice occurs in at least 29 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In addition, globalization and migration have brought immigrants from countries where cutting is commonly practiced to countries where cutting is not traditionally practiced and may even be illegal. In countries receiving immigrants, governments and development agencies would like to know if girls with parents who immigrated from practicing countries are at risk of being cut. Risk assessments, for example, could help governments identify the need for programs promoting the abandonment of cutting among immigrants. Extrapolating from the prevalence and incidence rates in practicing countries, however, is generally not sufficient to guarantee a valid estimate of risk in immigrant populations. In particular, immigrants might differ from their counterparts in the country of origin in terms of attitudes toward female genital cutting. Attitudes can differ because migrants represent a special sample of people from the country of origin or because immigrants acculturate after arriving in a new country. To examine these possibilities, we used a fully anonymous, computerized task to elicit implicit attitudes toward female genital cutting among Sudanese immigrants living in Switzerland and Sudanese people in Sudan. Results show that Sudanese immigrants in Switzerland were significantly more positive about uncut girls than Sudanese in Sudan, and that selective migration out of Sudan likely contributed substantially to this difference. We conclude by suggesting how our method could potentially be coupled with recent efforts to refine extrapolation methods for estimating cutting risk among immigrant populations. More broadly, our results highlight the need to better understand how heterogeneous attitudes can affect the risk of cutting among immigrant communities and in countries of origin.
We generalize Krugman's (1979) ‘new trade’ model by allowing for an explicit production chain in which a range of tasks is performed sequentially by a number of specialized teams. We demonstrate that an increase in market size induces a deeper division of labor among these teams which leads to an increase in firm productivity. The paper can be thought of as a formalization of Smith's (1776) famous theorem that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. It also sheds light on how market size differences can limit the scope for international technology transfers.
