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Browsing Economics by Author "Bucovetsky, Sam"
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Item Open Access Essays in Immigration and Migration(2019-03-05) Monteiro, Stein; Bucovetsky, SamThis research explores the socio-structural features of the migration and assimilation decision. The socio-structural features explored are the impact of extended family members on the migration decision of individuals within a household, and productivity differences on the assimilation rate of new immigrants. Extended families are a common feature of developing country households. I generalize the Mincer (1978) model of husband-wife migration by including decision makers from the extended family. The model with extended families predicts that migration decisions may become freer than in the husband-wife model because spouses are not more likely to be tied to their partners than members of the extended family. That is, marital status is a smaller deterrent to migration in extended family settings relative to nuclear families. I provide justification for the implications of the model using data from Nepal. Immigrants from poorer source countries have lower assimilation rates compared to immigrants from richer countries. Theory suggests that new immigrants from poor countries are exposed to co-ethnics more often than comparable immigrants from richer countries, which lead to lower assimilation rates. However, many new immigrants come with pre-immigration experience with the local culture which decreases learning costs. I insert investment into the matching model of Konya (2007). All immigrants face a cost to assimilating by investing in a process of cultural assimilation, but some new immigrants with large pre-immigration experience have significantly lower costs to investing. I provide evidence from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants in Canada: Waves 1-3. Source country richness has a significant positive effect on assimilation rates. But conditional on pre-immigration experience with the local culture, the exposure channel through which source country richness affects assimilation rates becomes insignificant. However, exposure to co-ethnics is not random, new immigrants face location choices among neighbourhoods in the host country. These location choices determine the level of exposure to other immigrants and the costs of learning the local native-born culture. I expand the model to include neighbourhood choice. Among neighbourhoods with fewer co-ethnics, immigrants from richer source country groups will sort into assimilating neighbourhoods. And neighbourhoods with a relatively large number of co-ethnics will receive some non-assimilating types. Using data from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants in Canada: Waves 1-3, I show that sorting is an important component of the exposure channel through which productivity differences affect assimilation rates. However, controlling for sorting, source country richness still has a significant positive effect on assimilation rates. There appears to be an alternate channel through which productivity differences affect assimilation rates.Item Open Access Essays on Private Contributions for Public Goods(2018-11-21) Zhang, Yi; Bucovetsky, SamIn many circumstances, public goods are funded by both government revenue and private contributions. Private contributions to public goods could achieve the same social goals as the government-funded public goods. Certain financial aid from the voluntary sectors reduces the heavy fiscal burdens of the public sector by sharing the responsibilities of providing public goods and services. As an alternative to the public provision of public goods, social planners encourage private contributions by providing fiscal subsidies as part of the income tax policy. My dissertation addresses the questions of whether the private provision of public goods is welfare improving in various aspects of theory and how effective it is applied to the Canadian tax schedule in an empirical model. In the second chapter of this dissertation, I focus on a particular case of the consumer's utility to investigate the effect of a government transfer to the private donation of a public good. Unlike the classic conclusion, the influence of income redistribution is not always neutral when I take consideration of the substitute relationship between the private contributed public good and the public provision of a public good. Then in chapter 3, I build on the traditional income tax model in Part I and improve it to a two-stage non-cooperative game in which it encompasses both governments funded public goods and private contributions in the optimal income tax problem in Part II. Finally, in chapter 4, I apply my theoretical model in an empirical setting using Canadian family expenditure data. I exploit this rich data on charitable contribution in Canada to assess the effectiveness of Canadian tax incentive towards charitable giving from the private sector. The empirical analysis illustrates that individuals in Canada are quite responsive to the change of tax incentive for charitable donation since price elasticity, in general, exceeds 1 in absolute value.