How health status changes as migrants age and become to their host country remains underexplored. This study investigates two key indicators—life expectancy (LE) and healthy life expectancy (HLE)—among migrants in Australia using nationally representative secondary data, including census-based Estimated Resident Population, 1

A prominent gender stereotype claims that “boys are better at learning mathematics than girls.” Confronted with such a parental attitude, how does this affect the well-being of 11- to 18-year-old students in Chinese middle schools? Although well-being has often been shown to be not much gender-diverse, the intergenerational consequences of such stereotypes are not well studied. Expecting too much from boys and too little from girls might damage self-esteem among school kids. Using large survey data covering districts all over China reveals that one-quarter of the parents agree with the math stereotype. It is shown that this has strong detrimental consequences for the offspring's well-being. Students are strongly more depressed, feeling blue, unhappy, not enjoying life, and sad with no male–female differences, whereas parental education does not matter for this transfer. Various robustness tests including other than math stereotypes and an IV analysis confirm the findings. Moderating such effects, which is in line with societal objectives in many countries, not only supports gender equality but also strengthens the mental health of children.

Non-cognitive abilities are supposed to affect students’ educational performance, who are challenged by parental expectations and norms. Using standard econometric techniques, parental gender stereotypes are shown to strongly decrease student wellbeing in China. Students are strongly more depressed, feeling blue, unhappy, not enjoying life and sad while parental education does not matter. The relationships though dealing with a gender-specific issue do not exhibit gender-specific differences: Neither does it matter who the parent is, nor whether the kid concerned is a boy or a girl. Parental stereotypes may undermine girls' self-confidence and make them more prone to anxiety and other mental health issues. For boys, stronger stereotypes may indicate higher expectations and pressures, which also generate negative emotions.

Ethnic groups tend to agglomerate and assemble, mostly in urban areas. While ethnic clustering is critically debated in societies and the consequences for economic outcomes are under debate in research, the process is not yet well understood. A separate literature has also examined the cultural and ethnic identity of immigrants and how these affect their economic performance and societal integration. However, an unexplored channel connects ethnic clustering with ethnic identity formation. Therefore this paper examines the role of ethnic geographic clustering in the sociocultural integration of immigrants. It employs survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, combined with disaggregated information at a low geographical level from the unexploited German full census of 1970 and 1987. We employ the exogenous placement of immigrants during their recruitment in the 1960s and 1970s and find that local co-ethnic concentration affects immigrants' cultural integration. Residential ethnic clustering strengthens immigrants' retention of an affiliation with their respective country of origin and weakens identification with the host society. The effects are nonlinear and only become significant at relatively high levels of co-ethnic concentration for the minority identity and at very low levels of local concentration for the majority identity. Our findings are robust to the use of an instrumental variable approach.

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While under communism the identity-providing religion was suppressed, religiosity is strong today even among the youth in post-communist countries. This provides an appropriate background to investigate how external and internal religiosity relate to risky behaviors like smoking, drinking, and drugs among the young. This study shows that not religion as such or internal religiosity, but largely observable (external) religiosity prevents them from wallowing in those vices. While this is found strongly for both males and females, those females doubting or reflecting religion show a somewhat smaller risky activity.

Background:The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 no longer a global health emergency on 5th May 2023; however, the impact of COVID-19 on life expectancy throughout the pandemic period is not clear. This study aimed to quantify and decompose the changes in life expectancy during 2019-2023 and corresponding age and gender disparities in 27 countries.Methods:Data were sourced from the Human Mortality Database, the World Population Prospects 2022 and the United Kingdom's Office for National Statistics. Life expectancy was estimated using the abridged life table method, while differentials of life expectancies were decomposed using the age-decomposition algorithm.Results:There was an overall reduction in life expectancy at age 5 among the 27 countries in 2020. Life expectancy rebounded in Western, Northern and Southern Europe in 2021 but further decreased in the United States, Chile and Eastern Europe in the same year. In 2022 and after, lost life expectancy years in the United States, Chile and Eastern Europe were slowly regained; however, as of 7th May 2023, life expectancy in 22 of the 27 countries had not fully recovered to its pre-pandemic level. The reduced life expectancy in 2020 was mainly driven by reduced life expectancy at age 65+, while that in subsequent years was mainly driven by reduced life expectancy at age 45-74. Women experienced a lower reduction in life expectancy at most ages but a greater reduction at age 85+.Conclusions:The pandemic has caused substantial short-term mortality variations during 2019-2023 in the 27 countries studied. Although most of the 27 countries experienced increased life expectancy after 2022, life expectancy in 22 countries still has not entirely regained its pre-pandemic level by May 2023. Threats of COVID-19 are more prominent for older adults and men, but special attention is needed for women aged 85+ years.

Coseriu's three-dimensional conception of varieties does not take into account all the existing varieties: some do not fit into the established categories and the status of others is diffuse; given the multifactorial nature of the varieties, the diffusion can be attributed to several dimensions. His conception ignores the dynamic character of the social status ot the varieties in the course of evolution. This paper offers a deconstructivist analysis of essential points in Koch and Oesterreicher's "variational chain", a theory that postulates a fixed orientation between the varieties of the diasystem. Cristicism is levelled at the mechanical character of its conception and at the rigidity of its orientation. A different vision (inspired by the energeia of Humboldt, including the role of the speaker) is proposed that considers varieties as a device that must be analyzed as a contact between varieties.

Previous research on internal mobility has neglected the role of local identity contrary to studies analyzing international migration. Examining social identity and labor market outcomes in China, the country with the largest internal mobility in the world, closes the gap. Instrumental variable estimation and careful robustness checks suggest that identifying as local associates with higher migrants’ hourly wages and lower hours worked, although monthly earnings seem to remain largely unchanged. Migrants with strong local identity are more likely to use local networks in job search, and to obtain jobs with higher average wages and lower average hours worked, suggesting the value of integration policies.

The global crisis of COVID-19 accentuates the existing vulnerabilities and represents a major challenge to sustainable development. This study addresses gender differences in the operation of global firms during the COVID-19 pandemic and is assessing the effectiveness of mitigation policies. Using survey data of 31,463 firms in 40 countries, we document that firms with more than 50% women of total workers (female-dominated firms) are more likely to be permanently closed than the others, and suffer more decrease in number of workers, operation hours, and sales. Female-dominated firms mainly rely on government grants as source of finance compared to other ways of financing, and they indeed are more likely to receive government support than other firms. Both firms’ performance and countries’ policy environment are driving the difference. Drawing on Institutional Theory, we explore the role of female-friendly policy environment on assisting vulnerable firms, and apply an IV approach to address the endogeneity issue. We find that supporting police measures could moderate difficulties faced by female-dominated firms. Our findings highlight the importance of the design of fiscal stimulus packages and social assistance programmes to cope with gender inequality in the Covid-19 pandemic and other possible disasters.

In March 1996, the Bundestag introduced a minimum wage law for the German construction business in order to protect native workers from low wage competition by posted workers from other EU countries. This Entsendegesetz (Posted Workers Act) was backed formally by the EU Posted Workers Directive of December 1996. This paper analyzes the economic and political background of the law as well as its impact on the German construction business according to economic theory and provisional empirical evidence from similar protective measures taken in the U.S. The effectiveness of the law is seriously limited by practical and conceptional problems, like resource constraints in control, shifts from legal to illegal employment, or compatibility with basic EU law and principles. Moreover, since the central problems of the German construction business are structural, one cannot expect much of a relief for the labor market of native workers. Since the Entsendegesetz seems therefore only justifiable in the short run in order to smoothen structural adjustment and to avoid political unrest and xenophobia, it should not be extended.

The expected year-on-year intrinsic mortality variations/changes are largely overlooked in the existing research when estimating the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality patterns. To fill this gap, this study provides a new assessment of the loss of life expectancy caused by COVID-19 in 27 countries considering both the actual and the expected changes in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020. Life expectancy in 2020 and the expected life expectancy in the absence of COVID-19 are estimated using the Lee-Carter model and data primarily from the Human Mortality Database. The results show that life expectancy in 21 of the 27 countries was expected to increase in 2020 had COVID-19 not occurred. By considering the expected mortality changes between 2019 and 2020, the study shows that, on average, the loss of life expectancy among the 27 countries in 2020 amounted to 1.33 year (95% CI 1.29–1.37) at age 15 and 0.91 years (95% CI 0.88–0.94) at age 65. Our results suggest that if the year-on-year intrinsic variations/changes in mortality were considered, the effects of COVID-19 on mortality are more profound than previously understood. This is particularly prominent for countries experiencing greater life expectancy increase in recent years.

Based on the current European discussion about immigration policy, this paper gives an overview of central economic consequences of immigration for a host country=s labor market. The most important theoretical arguments are presented and evaluated against the available empirical evidence. The paper concludes that immigration cannot per se be considered as good or bad for the labor market. Its impact on employment, wages and wealth depends crucially on the design of immigration policy. Immigration of selected workers may create gains in efficiency which also result in positive distributive effects, not only for capital but also for native labor.

Migrant health constitutes an important public health issue; however, variations in the ‘healthy migrant effect’ among migrants of different nativity are not adequately understood. To fill this gap, this study examines the life expectancy (LE) and healthy life expectancy (HLE) of the Australian-born population and eight major migrant groups in Australia for 2006, 2011 and 2016. The results show that compared with the Australian-born population, the foreign-born population overall had a higher LE and HLE but a lower HLE/LE ratio. Considerable variations in migrant health status according to nativity were also observed. Specifically, migrants from South Africa, Britain and Germany exhibited a similar or higher LE, HLE and HLE/LE ratio, while those from China, India, Italy and Greece had a higher LE but a significantly lower HLE/LE ratio compared with the Australian-born population. Lebanese migrants were the only group who experienced an unchanging LE and a declining HLE from 2006 to 2016. These notable differences in migrants' health outcomes with respect to nativity may be explained by the sociocultural differences between the origin and host countries and the different extents of migration selectivity of different migrant groups. Targeted countermeasures such as improving the quality of life of migrants from culturally diverse backgrounds or with negative migration experiences are suggested.

Whether the ‘healthy migrant effect’ exhibits different patterns in mortality and morbidity and how such patterns change during the life course have not been adequately understood in the literature. Using the datasets of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this study presents an in-depth investigation of the healthy migrant effect and its age variations in Australia. Specifically, this study estimates life expectancy (LE) and healthy life expectancy (HLE) of the Australia-born and overseas-born populations, as well as eight Australian migrant groups, and decomposes the HLE differences into mortality and morbidity differences from three dimensions: age, gender and country of birth. The results reveal that compared with the Australia-born population, the overseas-born population enjoys a prominently longer LE; however, they suffer a similar or lower HLE after age 65 and a lower HLE/LE ratio throughout all ages. Young overseas-born adults manifest a more significant health advantage in both mortality and morbidity than early-life and older overseas-born individuals; however, the morbidity advantage of young migrants, particularly those who are female and originated from culturally different countries, declines dramatically with ageing. The results suggest that overall, migrants do not have the same advantage in morbidity as they do in mortality and that health advantages of migrants decreases with time in both dimensions of health and more rapidly for morbidity. The results suggest that pertinent policies are needed to reduce acculturation-related challenges and to mitigate the decline in migrants’ health in the post-migration environment to ensure better quality of life outcomes of migrants.

China has seen a massive higher education expansion, which the literature has dated to the 1999–2008 period with quantitative and qualitative outcomes. However, the consequences for the publication success of Chinese authors worldwide are not well studied. We review the respective Chinese higher education policies and document the dramatic rise in publication success, with a focus on the field of Economics. A substantial set of regressions and robustness checks confirm the understanding that the higher education expansion has indeed let to a substantial worldwide rise in scientific publications in refereed economics journals fueled by the general incentives of the reform, through research collaborations and other quality improving factors.