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Economic Growth in European Regions: Divergence within Convergence
Iankov, Egor ; Jeong, Byeongju (advisor) ; Selezneva, Veronika (referee)
Studuji konvergenci a divergenci v regionech EU v letech 2000-2018. Používám údaje o HDP na obyvatele a modelované reálné výdaje v rámci režimů podpory EU regionů z členských zemí EU na úrovni členění NUTS2. Na toto nastavení aplikuji model β-konvergence. Ukazuji, že celková disperze regionů se od roku 2003 téměř bez přerušení zvyšuje. Pokud zahrnu fixní efekty v rámci jednotlivých zemí, rozptyl HDP na obyvatele se v letech 2000-2010 v průměru snižuje. Tento výsledek není zcela v souladu s regresní analýzou složených temp růstu a logaritmického počátečního HDP na obyvatele. Tento nesoulad je však vysvětlitelný vstupem nových regionů a prolínáním jednotlivých skupin regionů v roce 2018. Zjistil jsem, že členské země EU se od sebe navzájem liší, ale regiony v rámci jednotlivých zemí konvergují k průměru zemí. Další analýza ukazuje, že konvergence je robustní vůči zahrnutí regionálních charakteristik a podpory EU. Mé výsledky ukazují, že politika soudržnosti EU je při podpoře konvergence regionů EU úspěšná pouze částečně. Klíčová slova: β-konvergence, regionální politika EU, politika soudržnosti, HDP na obyvatele.
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Essays on the Economics of Migration
Vikhrov, Dmytro ; Jeong, Byeongju (advisor) ; Ubelmesser, Silke (referee) ; Destefanis, Sergio (referee)
Introduction This dissertation consists of four chapters, which I wrote during my Ph.D. studies at CERGE-EI. Being a migrant, I felt that my personal migration experience had something unique to share and this is how the topic of my thesis emerged. All four chapters analyze labor migration from different perspectives. In the first two chapters I research immigration policy. In a dynamic world where new technologies rapidly reduce mobility costs, immigration policy becomes an important tool in controlling immigration. In the remaining two chapters I focus on the issues of self-selection into emigration using the example of Ukraine and within-country mobility using the example of the Czech Republic. These patterns are important because they determine the direction and magnitude of welfare changes initiated by the mobility of labor. In Chapter one, I develop a theoretical model, which explains why and when a country imposes entry restrictions on the number and skill type of foreign workers. By imposing an immigration quota, a destination country indirectly affects the welfare of the origin country. Under some conditions, the quota positively affects the sending country welfare because it reduces the extent of the downward effect of new migrants on the wages at destination. Further, I describe how the quota...
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Essays on Return Migration and Economic Growth
Ivanova, Renata ; Jeong, Byeongju (advisor) ; Akee, Randall (referee) ; Gang, Ira (referee)
This dissertation addresses different aspects of return migration of labor, which represents a challenging field for investigation due to data limitations and methodological issues. The dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter, written in co-authorship with Byeongju Jeong, models selection of migrants with respect to educational attainment. We attempt to explain relatively low return rates among migrants with only secondary education compared to those of low- and highly educated migrants observed in the data. We develop a two-country overlapping generations (OLG) model with emigration and return migration undertaken by agents heterogeneous in terms of education. Our model is built on the decision mechanism proposed by Borjas & Bratsberg (1996), which we augment by assimilation costs and immigration policy restrictions. The U-shape pattern of return rates with respect to education is driven by a combination of two forces: sizable wage differentials between the foreign and home countries, which decline with education, and uncertain opportunities for status adjustment to permanent residence. Our model predicts that migrants with secondary education have both incentives and opportunities to remain permanently in the foreign country. In the second chapter, using the example of Vietnam, we...
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Essays on the Economics of Education
Todua, Gega ; Jeong, Byeongju (advisor) ; Patrinos, Harry Anthony (referee) ; Veramendi, Gregory (referee)
In the first chapter, we study financial aid policies in developing countries that sup- port students' education abroad. We collect a unique data-set on government-funded scholarship and loan programs and establish stylized facts for developing countries. We find that scholarship programs select students based on merit criteria, target grad- uate and postgraduate studies, and require recipients to return after graduation more frequently than loan programs do. We build a two-country student migration model that qualitatively accounts for the observed patterns. In the model, government inter- vention is justified for two reasons. First, students from a developing country are as- sumed to be financially constrained and cannot afford education abroad. Second, the government values the productivity of "returnees" more highly than the market does. We argue that when students are uncertain about their future productivity and may fail in their studies, scholarship programs can insure them against potential default. Consequently, if students differ in their expected ability, under certain conditions, a government with a tight budget will prioritize ex-ante high-ability students and sup- port them with scholarships with return requirement, and support ex-ante low-ability students with loans without return...
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Talent rewards, talent uncertainty, and career tracks
Jeong, Byeongju
I present a model in which (1) a more talent-demanding task increases both rewards for high talent and the penalty for low talent due to a greater fixed cost of production, and (2) individual talent is task-specific and talent updates occur only for tasks near the attempted task, which implies a task-sequence problem in which the initial task constrains subsequent task choices. Rising talent rewards and penalty stemming from a rising scale economy\nmotivate young workers to choose a more talent-demanding task, raise the failure rate (i.e., the probability of the updated talent being lower than the exit threshold), and concentrate income gains in a diminishing fraction of high-talent workers. Rising talent rewards and penalty also increase the share of young workers subject to binding minimum currentincome constraints, thus increasing the dispersion of tasks among young workers. The model sheds light on the rising stratification of careers among young workers and the rising polarization of the residual labor income distribution (i.e., the labor income distribution controlling for observable worker characteristics such as education and age).
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Essays on Monetary Policy
Aliyev, Ruslan ; Jeong, Byeongju (advisor) ; Bossi, Luca (referee) ; Markiewicz, Agnieszka (referee)
This thesis deals with topics related to monetary policy in general. The dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter focuses on the role of monetary policy in resource-rich developing countries from a theoretical perspective. The second chapter empirically analyses the determinants of the choice of exchange rate regime in resource- rich countries. The third chapter studies the monetary transmission channels in the Czech Republic by using micro-level data. In the first chapter we construct a DSGE model for a small, open economy to show that if fiscal indiscipline, in the form of immediate responses to foreign resource revenue changes is inevitable, then monetary policy can help improve the allocation problem. The simulation results indicate that targeting the exchange rate or price level, through foreign exchange interventions by the central bank, can soften the negative effects of Dutch Disease and stabilize the economy in the face of volatile natural resource revenues in the short run. We also find that a fixed exchange rate regime outperforms price level targeting by delivering higher isolation and hence less vulnerability to shocks in natural resource revenues. In contrast, if the central bank chooses to pursue a laissez faire policy, i.e., not to intervene, then the economy becomes...
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Essays in Public Policies and Immigration Control
Aslanyan, Gurgen ; Jeong, Byeongju (advisor) ; Imrohoroglu, Selahatin (referee) ; Razin, Assaf (referee)
Preamble This work presents a theoretical study on some aspects of the connection between immigration and social security. The work consists of two parts: The two chapters of Part 1 study an open economy environment, while the third chapter in Part 2 studies a closed economy. Chapter 1 (in Part I), entitled 'Immigration Control and Intergenerational Conflict' (CERGE-EI Working Paper 453), concentrates on the intergenerational conflict that selective immigration causes in a host economy. The chapter shows that the policy-setting generation prefers a selective migration policy (i.e. allowing only high-skilled migrants) though, under rather permissive assumptions, the successive generations and the overall economy suffer welfare losses from the policy. The reverse also holds as the results are driven by the skill-fertility trade-off: Thus a nonselective policy, that is welfare depriving for the initial generation, guarantees higher welfare for the subsequent cohorts. Chapter 2 (in Part I), entitled 'Can Social Security Survive a Non-Selective Immigration? ' , continues on the theme of Chapter 1 and shows that the policy-setting initial population may prefer to abandon the existing unfunded social security system in order to redistribute the gains of nonselective migration from the future cohorts towards...
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Essays on Return Migration and Economic Growth
Ivanova, Renata ; Jeong, Byeongju (advisor) ; Akee, Randall (referee) ; Gang, Ira (referee)
This dissertation addresses different aspects of return migration of labor, which represents a challenging field for investigation due to data limitations and methodological issues. The dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter, written in co-authorship with Byeongju Jeong, models selection of migrants with respect to educational attainment. We attempt to explain relatively low return rates among migrants with only secondary education compared to those of low- and highly educated migrants observed in the data. We develop a two-country overlapping generations (OLG) model with emigration and return migration undertaken by agents heterogeneous in terms of education. Our model is built on the decision mechanism proposed by Borjas & Bratsberg (1996), which we augment by assimilation costs and immigration policy restrictions. The U-shape pattern of return rates with respect to education is driven by a combination of two forces: sizable wage differentials between the foreign and home countries, which decline with education, and uncertain opportunities for status adjustment to permanent residence. Our model predicts that migrants with secondary education have both incentives and opportunities to remain permanently in the foreign country. In the second chapter, using the example of Vietnam, we...
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Essays on the Economics of Migration
Vikhrov, Dmytro ; Jeong, Byeongju (advisor) ; Ubelmesser, Silke (referee) ; Destefanis, Sergio (referee)
Introduction This dissertation consists of four chapters, which I wrote during my Ph.D. studies at CERGE-EI. Being a migrant, I felt that my personal migration experience had something unique to share and this is how the topic of my thesis emerged. All four chapters analyze labor migration from different perspectives. In the first two chapters I research immigration policy. In a dynamic world where new technologies rapidly reduce mobility costs, immigration policy becomes an important tool in controlling immigration. In the remaining two chapters I focus on the issues of self-selection into emigration using the example of Ukraine and within-country mobility using the example of the Czech Republic. These patterns are important because they determine the direction and magnitude of welfare changes initiated by the mobility of labor. In Chapter one, I develop a theoretical model, which explains why and when a country imposes entry restrictions on the number and skill type of foreign workers. By imposing an immigration quota, a destination country indirectly affects the welfare of the origin country. Under some conditions, the quota positively affects the sending country welfare because it reduces the extent of the downward effect of new migrants on the wages at destination. Further, I describe how the quota...
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Essays on Natural Resource Impact
Aliyev, Ilkin ; Jeong, Byeongju (advisor) ; Popper, Helen (referee) ; Popov, Alexander (referee)
Essays on Natural Resource Impact Ilkin Aliyev Dissertation Abstract This dissertation consists of three essays on the impact of natural resources on economic and fiscal performance. The first chapter investigates the resource impact on economic growth using a non-parametric minimum-distance matching method. Countries are matched according to their observable characteristics, and the relative growth rates of GDP of each matched pair are computed. In this way, it is possible to analyze the impact of the resources on relative growth rates, rather than on absolute growth rates as has been done in previous studies. Assuming a correlation between observables and unobservables, the matching based on observables may control for unobservables as well. If this assumption is satisfied, matching allows us to control for more variables and to single out the direct effect of the resource abundance variable. The study uses different measures of resource abundance to check the robustness of such a relationship. The empirical results suggest that there is a strong negative relationship between the relative abundance of exhaustible resources and economic growth. For non-exhaustible resources, the results are mixed, with a frequent positive impact on relative growth. The contrary evidence found in Sala-i-Martin et al. (2004)...
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