JOHN CROMARTIE, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) - Economic Research Service (ERS)
Email: jbc@ers.usda.gov

Members of the baby boom cohort, now 45-63 years old, are approaching a period in their lives when moves to rural and small-town destinations increase. An analysis of age-specific, net migration during the 1990s reveals extensive shifts in migration patterns as Americans move through different life-cycle stages. Assuming similar age patterns of migration, this report identifies the types of nonmetropolitan counties that are likely to experience the greatest surge in baby boom migration during 2000-20 and projects the likely impact on the size and distribution of retirement-age populations in destination counties. The analysis finds a significant increase in the propensity to migrate to nonmetro counties as people reach their fifties and sixties and projects a shift in migration among boomers toward more isolated settings, especially those with high natural and urban amenities and lower housing costs. If baby boomers follow past migration patterns, the nonmetro population age 55-75 will increase by 30 percent between now and 2020.

MICHAEL S. RENDALL, RAND Corporation
Email: msr5@cornell.edu

The resilience of family and household structure to displacement-inducing natural disaster is investigated. Households from a survey that traces the outcomes of a population-representative sample of households in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina are compared statistically to households from a national sample. Household breakup following Katrina was extremely high among extended-family households, exacerbated by the high prevalence of extended-family households in New Orleans before the hurricane. While the highest rates of household breakup occurred among households whose residences were made uninhabitable by the Hurricane and its aftermath, city-wide impacts on household breakup were found.

JOSHUA J. LEWER, Bradley University
Email: jlewer@bradley.edu
GAIL PACHECO, Auckland University of Technology - School of Business and Economics
Email: gpac002@ec.auckland.ac.nz
STEPHANIÉ ROSSOUW, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Email: stephanie.rossouw@aut.ac.nz

This paper contributes to the immigration literature by generating two unique non-economic quality of life (QOL) indices and testing their role on recent migration patterns. Applying the generated quality of life indices in conjunction with other independent welfare measures to an extended gravity model of immigration for 16 OECD destination countries from 1991 to 2000 suggests an insignificant role for QOL in the immigration process. The panel results suggest that other economic variables such as the stock of immigrants from the source country already living in the OECD destination country, population size, relative incomes, and geographic factors all significantly drive the flow of immigration for the sample.

PATRICK P. ARNI, University of Lausanne - Department of Economics (DEEP)
Email: patrick.arni@unil.ch
RAFAEL LALIVE, University of Lausanne - Department of Economics (DEEP), Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research)
Email: Rafael.Lalive@unil.ch
JAN C. VAN OURS, Tilburg University - Department of Economics, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)
Email: vanours@uvt.nl

This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of benefit sanctions, i.e. temporary reductions in unemployment benefits as punishment for noncompliance with eligibility requirements. In addition to the effects on unemployment durations, we evaluate the effects on post-unemployment employment stability, on exits from the labor market and on earnings. In our analysis we use a rich set of Swiss register data which allow us to distinguish between ex ante effects, the effects of warnings and the effects of enforcement of benefit sanctions. Adopting a multivariate mixed proportional hazard approach to address selectivity, we find that both warnings and enforcement increase the job finding rate and the exit rate out of the labor force. Warnings do not affect subsequent employment stability but do reduce post-unemployment earnings. Actual benefit reductions lower the quality of post-unemployment jobs both in terms of job duration as well as in terms of earnings. The net effect of a benefit sanction on post-unemployment income is negative. Over a period of two years after leaving unemployment workers who got a benefit sanction imposed face a net income loss equivalent to 30 days of full pay due to the ex post effect. In addition to that, stricter monitoring may reduce net earnings by up to 4 days of pay for every unemployed worker due to the ex ante effect.

ANDREA BELLUCCI, University of Urbino - Faculty of Economics
Email: andrea.bellucci@uniurb.it
ALEXANDER BORISOV, Indiana University Bloomington - Department of Finance
Email: aborisov@indiana.edu
ALBERTO ZAZZARO, Università Politecnica delle Marche - Faculty of Economics
Email: ZAZZARO@DEANOVELL.UNIAN.IT

In this paper we study the relevance of the gender of the contracting parties involved in lending. We show that female entrepreneurs face tighter access to credit, even though they do not pay higher interest rates. The effect is independent of the information available about the borrower and holds if we control for unobservable individual effects. The gender of the loan officer is also important: we find that female officers are more risk-averse or less self-confident than male officers as they tend to restrict credit availability to new, unestablished borrowers more than their male counterparts.

CHARLES BRAM CADSBY, University of Guelph
Email: bcadsby@uoguelph.ca
MAROS SERVATKA, University of Canterbury - Department of Economics
Email: maros.servatka@canterbury.ac.nz
FEI SONG, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University
Email: fsong@ryerson.ca

Employing a two-by-two factorial design that manipulates whether dictator groups are single or mixed-sex and whether procedures are single or double-blind, we examine gender effects in a standard dictator game. No gender effect was found in any of the experimental treatments. Moreover, neither single - versus mixed - sex groups nor level of anonymity had any impact on either male or female behavior.

BURKHARD C. SCHIPPER, University of California, Davis - Department of Economics
Email: bcschipper@ucdavis.edu

Contrary to claims by Gul and Pesendorfer (2008), I show that standard economics makes use of non-choice evidence in a meaningful way. This is because standard economics solely grounded in the theory of choice is "incomplete''. That is, it has content that can not be revealed with any general choice procedure.

JOCHEN KLUVE, RWI Essen: Rheinisch-Westfaelisches Institut fuer Wirtschaftsforschung, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Email: jochen.kluve@rwi-essen.de
MARCUS TAMM, RWI Essen
Email: tamm@rwi-essen.de

Over the last decades many OECD countries introduced parental leave regulations in order to counteract low and decreasing birth rates. In general, these regulations aim at making parenthood more attractive and more compatible with a working career, especially for women. The recent German Elterngeld reform is one example: By replacing 67 per cent of prepartum parental labor earnings for up to 14 months after birth of the child - if both father and mother take up the transfer - it intends to i) smooth or prevent households’ earnings decline postpartum, ii) make childbearing attractive for working women while iii) keeping them close to the labor market, and iv) incentivize fathers to participate in childcare. We evaluate the reform by using a natural experiment created by the quick legislative process of the Elterngeld reform: Comparing outcomes of parents with children born shortly after and before the coming into effect of the law on 1 January 2007 yields unbiased estimates of the reform effects, because at the time when these children were conceived none of the parents knew that the regulation would be in force by the time their child is born. Our results are based on unique data from the official evaluation of the reform, which we conducted for the German government, and they show that the reform has been generally successful in attaining its objectives. In particular, we find a significant decrease in mothers’ employment probability during the 12 months after giving birth, and a significant increase in mothers’ employment probability after the Elterngeld transfer expires.