Negative Self-selection Research Articles

Not by bread alone: Public–private intersectoral gap in job satisfaction

The choice of a workplace, in the public or private sector, is not accidental. The paper presents a study on the public—private intersectoral gap in job satisfaction (JS). Given the observed wage premium in the private sector, it can be assumed that there are non-monetary forms of compensation for the wage loss in the public sector. They are expected to manifest themselves in job safety during periods of recession, which might affect the intersectoral gap in job satisfaction. Evaluation on panel data with fixed individual effects allows solving the problem of self-selection into a certain sector. A study based on RLMS-HSE data shows that in the period 2002—2021 the intersectoral gap in job satisfaction, as well as its elements — satisfaction with the labour contract, salary and promotion, — was generally insignificant. This does not rule out self-selection into a particular sector but explains the low level of transitions between the sectors. A significant intersectoral gap in job satisfaction is revealed for less competitive groups in the labor market during crises. This is the evidence of negative self-selection. During the COVID-19 pandemic, women, young workers (17—34 years old), and at other times, workers over 55 years old employed in the public sector rated JS significantly higher. Negative self-selection into the public sector is more likely to be attributed to specific socio-demographic groups than to the entire sector. Wage, as well as its degree in comparison to the average one in the profession in the local labor market, affects the JS of public employees to a lesser extent. This suggests that public workers are less sensitive to monetary rewards and value job safety, self-realization opportunities and a sense of usefulness of work for society more.

Returning home for a better job? Return migration, family background, and labor market outcomes among recent college graduates in China

In previous studies of migration, return migration is usually considered a behavior determined by negative self-selection. This study pools data from three waves of the China College Student Survey (2010, 2013, and 2015) to explore the return migration behavior of Chinese college graduates and its impact on their labor market performance. The results show that graduate return migrants have advantages in terms of family background, although they do not perform as well in terms of human capital. Relative to graduate nonreturn migrants, return migrants have a greater chance of securing positions in governmental organizations, and this advantage is reinforced by family political capital. In addition, income analysis shows that return migrants seem to have an advantage over nonreturn migrants when the effects of migrant selectivity are considered. This study systematically discusses the monetary and occupational returns to return migration of highly educated individuals in a non-Western context, and has important implications for our understanding of the relationship between migration and social inequality.

Back to parents: earnings of young adults and informal care

ABSTRACT Return migrants are often considered to be disadvantaged in terms of earnings. However, family needs might affect an individual’s migration decision and allocation of his (her) time between formal employment and informal care. The generalized Roy model employed to account for self-selection in migration decisions shows that the losses in earnings of return migrants are overestimated for female young adults when family characteristics, such as the presence of children or parents in need of care, are not accounted for. The study is based on age- and gender-specific samples of individuals born in 1974 and followed between the ages of 25 and 32 years drawn from Swedish longitudinal data. The results suggest that female internal return migrants rely on grandparenting to reconcile their family and working life. In particular, mothers of children under eight years old earn more when they reside close to their parents. The negative self-selection of male return migrants remains after controlling for family characteristics. This likely relates to differences in the labour supply as returns on education do not differ by residential location choice. The estimates do not demonstrate any link between potential informal elder care and a change in the earnings of young adults.

Do workers negative self-select when they commute? Evidence for the Chilean case of long-distance commuting.

Long-distance commuting (LDC) as a strategy of labor factor mobility has become relevant in recent decades, mainly in those economies characterized by a significant relative weight of extractive activities. The phenomenon is key to understanding the current structure and dynamics of these labor markets, although little is known about self-selection in LDC. This document addresses this knowledge gap by analyzing the case of Chile using functional areas. Chile is a country where LDC has become the principal strategy of labor mobility and is closely linked to the mining and construction sectors. The results obtained show a pattern of negative self-selection, meaning that it is the least qualified who have the highest probability of commuting between functional areas. Commuting could therefore be more than just a mechanism for accessing qualified labor, allowing less qualified individuals access job opportunities when the labor market where they come from is more qualified.

Agroforestry, Soil Conservation Technologies, and Agriculture Production in Pakistan

This study estimates the impacts of adopting agroforestry and other soil conservation technologies (SCTs) on agricultural production in Pakistan. Using the stratified random sampling technique, 428 farmers were interviewed through well-designed questionnaires. The treatment effects model is used to accommodate the self-selective nature of technology adoption. It is found that agroforestry and chemical fertilizer significantly increase land and total factor productivity (TFP). However, the average treatment effect on adopters of agroforestry technology is slightly negative due to the negative self-selection effect. It can be concluded that these SCTs can be characterized as preventive actions taken by the farmers facing adverse conditions. Using the same estimation technique, SCT’s impacts were analyzed on land and labor productivity. Its results are comparable with those of TFP results, conforming that these SCTs primarily increase land productivity.

Television, Health, and Happiness: A Natural Experiment in West Germany

Watching television is the most time-consuming human activity besides work but its role for individual well-being is unclear. Negative consequences portrayed in the literature raise the question whether this popular pastime constitutes an economic good or bad, and hence serves as a prime example of irrational behavior reducing individual health and happiness. Using rich panel data, we are the first to comprehensively address this question by exploiting a large-scale natural experiment in West Germany, where people in geographically restricted areas received commercial TV via terrestrial frequencies. Contrary to previous research, we find no health impact when TV consumption increases. For life satisfaction, we even find positive effects. Additional analyses support the notion that TV is not an economic bad and that non-experimental evidence seems to be driven by negative self-selection.

Soil and Water Conservation technology adoption and labour allocation: Evidence from Ethiopia

Abstract Soil and Water Conservation (SWC) technologies are viewed as part of a solution to increase the resilience of the agriculture sector to climate change. Research has shown that SWC technologies are effective at controlling erosion and increasing yields but are labour intensive. However, the quantification of their labour impacts remains an important research gap. In this paper, I estimate the labour impacts of adopting SWC technologies in Ethiopia. Using an endogenous Switching Regression Model (ESRM), I find that adopting SWC technologies increases plot-level adult labour by 35%. Impacts on child labour depend on the number of adults in the household. Specifically, estimated impacts range from 29% for the full sample to 78% for the sub-sample of households with fewer than three adults. I also find some evidence of negative self-selection in the case of child labour, which suggests that adopters have a comparative advantage since they are able to adopt the technology with smaller impacts on child labour as a result of unobservable characteristics. The estimated labour impacts also provide a plausible explanation for why farmers may not adopt SWC technologies despite their economic profitability. Ultimately, the paper argues that understanding the heterogeneity and magnitude of the labour impacts is an important part of understanding potential trade-offs of adopting SWC technologies. Given the estimated labour impacts, policies that relax the household’s labour constraints could be an effective mechanism to spur the adoption of labour-intensive environmentally agricultural practices, while minimizing potential negative effects.

Former Communist Party Membership and Present-Day Entrepreneurship in Central and Eastern Europe

After the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, former party members were particularly likely to start businesses and become entrepreneurs. However, it remains unclear whether this entrepreneurial activity was driven by the resources, information and opportunities provided by former party membership or because people with specific individual attributes were more likely to become party members (self-selection). This study is the first to separate the causal effect of former Communist party membership from self-selection. Using individual-level Life in Transition–III survey and instrumental variables analysis, we find that, in Central and Eastern European countries, membership of former Communist party has facilitated business set-up but not business longevity. Our results also suggest evidence of negative self-selection, meaning that people who joined the former ruling party tended have fewer of the traits associated with entrepreneurship such as motivation, risk tolerance, and entrepreneurial spirit. We show that former Communist party membership still matters for business practices, business ethics, and the nature of doing business in transition economies.

The Opportunity Costs of Becoming a Dean: Does Leadership in Academia Crowd Out Research?

Researchers in academia typically perform different tasks: research, teaching and services to the scientific community. We analyze the opportunity costs in terms of a potentially reduced publication productivity associated with becoming a dean in the German institutional setting where deans are non-professional expert-leaders who temporarily take the dean position. Theoretically, we distinguish between two different effects that relate deanship and publication productivity: a resource effect where publication productivity during and—as a result of potentially having developed a taste for service—also post deanship decrease as a result of a reduction of the available time for research and a self-selection effect where pre-deanship publication productivity is lower than that of peers who are not about to become dean. Based on a dataset of 1110 business and economics researchers from German-speaking universities, we find evidence for a resource effect with leadership in academia reducing research productivity during and also post deanship. We find no evidence of a negative self-selection effect in the sense of less successful researchers being more likely to take the position of a dean. Reduced research productivity during and post deanship as compared to those researchers that never became dean is driven by those researchers who become dean in later periods of their career, i. e., presumably by those who deliberately shift their focus away from research and towards a stronger engagement in the scientific community in their late career years. Early career deans, on the contrary, seem to see their deanship more as a transitory role and are able to compensate the reduced resources during deanship, and they also do not suffer from a reduced publication productivity post deanship.

International Import Competition and the Decision to Migrate: Evidence from Mexico

We analyze the effects of the increase in China’s import competition on Mexican domestic and international migration. We exploit the variation in exposure to competition from China, following its accession to the WTO in 2001, across Mexican municipalities and estimate the effect of international competition on the individual decision to migrate. Controlling for individual and municipality features, we find that individuals living in municipalities more exposed to Chinese import competition are more likely to migrate to other municipalities within Mexico, while a negative effect is found on the decision to migrate to the US. In particular, we find that Chinese import competition reduces migrants’ negative self-selection: the rising international competition lowers the likelihood of low-educated, low-income people to migrate to the US, by making them more financially constrained.

International import competition and the decision to migrate: Evidence from Mexico

We analyze the effects of the increase in China's import competition on Mexican domestic and international migration. We exploit the variation in exposure to competition from China, following its accession to the WTO in 2001, across Mexican municipalities and estimate the effect of international competition on the individual decision to migrate. Controlling for individual and municipality features, we find that individuals living in municipalities more exposed to Chinese import competition are more likely to migrate to other municipalities within Mexico, while a negative effect is found on the decision to migrate to the US. In particular, we find that Chinese import competition reduces migrants' negative self-selection: the rising international competition lowers the likelihood of low-educated, low-income people to migrate to the US, by making them more financially constrained. We do not find any evidence that changes in demand for Mexican workers in the US drive our results.

The Opportunity Costs of Becoming a Dean: Does Leadership in Academia Crowd out Research?

Researchers in academia typically perform different tasks: research, teaching and services to the scientific community. We analyze the opportunity costs in terms of a potentially reduced publication productivity associated with becoming a dean in the German institutional setting where deans are non-professional expert-leaders who temporarily take the dean position. Theoretically, we distinguish between two different effects that relate deanship and publication productivity: a resource effect where publication productivity during and – as a result of potentially having developed a taste for service –also post deanship decrease as a result of a reduction of the available time for research and a self-selection effect where pre-deanship publication productivity is lower than that of peers who are not about to become dean. Based on a dataset of 1,110 business and economics researchers from German-speaking universities, we find evidence for a resource effect with leadership in academia reducing research productivity during and also post deanship. We find no evidence of a negative self-selection effect in the sense of less successful researchers being more likely to take the position of a dean. Reduced research productivity during and post deanship as compared to those researchers that never became dean is driven by those researchers who become dean in later periods of their career, i.e., presumably by those who deliberately shift their focus away from research and towards a stronger engagement in the scientific community in their late career years. Early career deans, on the contrary, seem to see their deanship more as a transitory role and are able to compensate the reduced resources during deanship, and they also do not suffer from a reduced publication productivity post deanship.

Self-selection in the market of teachers

Public school teachers are usually paid according to centralized earning schedules, in which their income depends mainly on experience. By contrast, in private schools, there is high wage dispersion, and salaries correspond mainly to teachers’ performance. That dichotomous labour regulation encourages teachers with better unobservable skills to self-select into private schools because the likelihood of earning higher wages is higher than in public schools. The other side of the coin is the self-selection of ‘bad’ teachers into public schools. Using a representative sample of Chilean teachers, we estimate a two-sector Roy model to test self-selection. We find evidence of negative self-selection of teachers into public schools.

La salida de inmigrantes en contextos de declive económico ¿Cambia la autoselección durante fases recesivas?

En este artículo se estudian los flujos de salida de la población de origenextranjero residente en España. En concreto, se analizan las variacionesen la probabilidad de emigrar y de la intensidad de la autoselección endistintas fases del ciclo económico. Para ello se estiman modelos deanálisis de supervivencia a partir de datos de la Encuesta de PoblaciónActiva entre 2005 y 2010. Los resultados muestran, por una parte, unaumento de la probabilidad de emigrar desde el inicio de la recesión. Porotra, que la probabilidad de salir es mayor entre los inmigrantes conpeores resultados laborales y menos recursos formativos, tal y comosugiere la economía neoclásica. Sin embargo, el efecto del desempleo ydel déficit en capital humano es menor desde 2008. Es decir, durante larecesión la autoselección negativa se suaviza en comparación con elperiodo expansivo de la economía.

Human Capital Traps? Enclave Effects Using Linked Employer-Household Data

This study uses linked employer-household data to measure the impact of immigrant social networks, as identified via neighborhood and workplace affiliation, on immigrant earnings. Though ethnic enclaves can provide economic opportunities through job creation and job matching, they can also stifle the assimilation process by limiting interactions between enclave members and non-members. I find that higher residential and workplace ethnic clustering among immigrants is consistently correlated with lower earnings. For immigrants with a high school education or less, these correlations are primarily due to negative self-selection. On the other hand, self-selection fails to explain the lower earnings associated with higher ethnic clustering for immigrants with post-secondary schooling. The evidence suggests that co-ethnic clustering has no discernible effect on the earnings of immigrants with lower education, but may be leading to human capital traps for immigrants who have more than a high school education.

International migration, imperfect information, and brain drain

We consider a model of international migration where skills of workers are imperfectly observed by firms in the host country and where information asymmetries are more severe for immigrants than for natives. Because of imperfect information, firms statistically dicriminate highly-skilled migrants by paying them at their expected productivity. The decision of whether to migrate or not depends on the proportion of highly-skilled workers among the migrants. The migration game exhibits strategic complementarities, which, because of standard coordination problems, lead to multiple equilibria. We characterize them and examine how international migration affects the income of individuals in sending and receiving countries, and of migrants themselves. We also analyze under which conditions there is positive or negative self-selection of migrants.

International migration, imperfect information, and brain drain

We consider a model of international migration where skills of workers are imperfectly observed by firms in the host country and where information asymmetries are more severe for immigrants than for natives. There are two stages. In the first one, workers in the South decide whether to move and pay the migration costs. These costs are assumed to be sunk. In the second stage, firms offer wages to the immigrant and native workers who are in the country. Because of imperfect information, firms statistically discriminate high-skilled migrants by paying them at their expected productivity. The decision of whether to migrate or not depends on the proportion of high-skilled workers among the migrants. The migration game exhibits strategic complementarities, which, because of standard coordination problems, lead to multiple equilibria. We characterize them and examine how international migration affects the income of individuals in sending and receiving countries, and of migrants themselves. We also analyze under which conditions there is positive or negative self-selection of migrants.

Measurement Error in Performance Studies of Health Information Technology: Lessons from the Management Literature

Just as researchers and clinicians struggle to pin down the benefits attendant to health information technology (IT), management scholars have long labored to identify the performance effects arising from new technologies and from other organizational innovations, namely the reorganization of work and the devolution of decision-making authority. This paper applies lessons from that literature to theorize the likely sources of measurement error that yield the weak statistical relationship between measures of health IT and various performance outcomes. In so doing, it complements the evaluation literature's more conceptual examination of health IT's limited performance impact. The paper focuses on seven issues, in particular, that likely bias downward the estimated performance effects of health IT. They are 1.) negative self-selection, 2.) omitted or unobserved variables, 3.) mis-measured contextual variables, 4.) mismeasured health IT variables, 5.) lack of attention to the specific stage of the adoption-to-use continuum being examined, 6.) too short of a time horizon, and 7.) inappropriate units-of-analysis. The authors offer ways to counter these challenges. Looking forward more broadly, they suggest that researchers take an organizationally-grounded approach that privileges internal validity over generalizability. This focus on statistical and empirical issues in health IT-performance studies should be complemented by a focus on theoretical issues, in particular, the ways that health IT creates value and apportions it to various stakeholders.

International Migration, Imperfect Information, and Brain Drain

We consider a model of international migration where skills of workers are imperfectly observed by firms in the host country and where information asymmetries are more severe for immigrants than for natives. There are two stages. In the first one, workers in the South decide whether to move and pay the migration costs. These costs are assumed to be sunk. In the second stage, firms offer wages to the immigrant and native workers who are in the country. Because of imperfect information, firms statistically discriminate high-skilled migrants by paying them at their expected productivity. The decision of whether to migrate or not depends on the proportion of high-skilled workers among the migrants. The migration game exhibits strategic complementarities, which, because of standard coordination problems, lead to multiple equilibria. We characterize them and examine how international migration affects the income of individuals in sending and receiving countries, and of migrants themselves. We also analyze under which conditions there is positive or negative self-selection of migrants.

Self-Selection Patterns in Mexico-U.S. Migration: The Role of Migration Networks

This paper examines the role of migration networks in determining self-selection patterns of Mexico-U.S. migration. A simple theoretical framework shows the impact of networks on migration incentives at different education levels and how this affects the composition of migrant skills. Empirically, we find positive or education-neutral selection in communities with weak migrant networks but negative self-selection in communities with stronger networks. This is consistent with high migration costs driving positive or intermediate self-selection, as advocated by Chiquiar and Hanson (2005), and with negative self-selection being driven by lower returns to education in the United States than in Mexico, as advocated by Borjas (1987).