This paper examines foreign exchange intervention based on novel daily data covering 33 countries from 1995 to 2011. We find that intervention is widely used and an effective policy tool, with a success rate in excess of 80 percent under some criteria. The policy works well in terms of smoothing the path of exchange rates, and in stabilizing the exchange rate in countries with narrow band regimes. Moving the level of the exchange rate in flexible regimes requires that some conditions are met, including the use of large volumes and that intervention is made public and supported via communication. (JEL E52, E58, F31, F33, O19, O24)

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractIncreasing labor migration and simultaneous aging of societies are two important demographic developments many poor countries face. Elderly people who are left behind may experience a decrease in welfare when their children migrate. This paper investigates the effect of migration on various dimensions of elderly health using unique data from Moldova, which has one of the highest emigration rates in the world. We find positive migration effects on the body mass index (BMI), mobility and self-reported health. No effects are found on depression and cognitive capacity. We trace these positive outcomes to an income effect which leads to improvements in diet and a reallocation of time use from subsistence farming to leisure and sleep. These positive effects seem to compensate the elderly for decreasing social contact with their migrant family members.

No abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Returns to Occupational Foreign Language Use: Evidence from Germany Terms of use: Documents in Tobias Stöhr Kiel Institute for the World EconomyAbstract This paper analyses the wage premia associated with workers' occupational use of foreign languages in Germany. After eliminating timeinvariant unobserved heterogeneity and other confounding factors, sizable returns of about 10 percent to applying fluent English skills are found. Returns to occupational use of other foreign languages are, if anything, restricted to a few specialized occupations. Compared to non-migrants, immigrants receive more than twice the return for using English. Returns depend crucially on speaking German well, thus excluding many first generation migrants and are found to occur particularly in service occupations that involve international factor flows. In such occupations it is likely that migrants can apply complementary skills such as international experience that their non-migrant counterparts lack. As immigrants do not earn significant wage premia for applying their native language on the job in addition to those for English, their trade-fostering potential seems to be unlocked by complementary fluency in the two business languages German and English.

This article provides the first-ever analysis of the structure of public preferences for asylum and refugee policy, a highly politicized policy area that has attracted little scholarly attention to date. We first conceptualise the core dimensions of asylum and refugee policy and then conduct an original conjoint experiment with 12,000 respondents across eight European countries to examine how different policy designs impact on public support. Our results demonstrate that Europeans are generally committed to policies that provide protection to asylum-seekers and refugees but this commitment tends to be contingent upon policy features which allow for a means of control, namely through the implementation of limits or conditions. We find this pattern of preferences to be remarkably similar in both the old and more recent EU Member States that we surveyed. Our results imply that some aspects of the current model of the international refugee system are misaligned with the more control-based model that Europeans would prefer. We conclude by discussing our findings in the context of existing research and ongoing political debates about policy reforms.