Newsletter edited by Sara de la Rica, ESPE Secretary,
University of the Basque Country. Spain

Dear ESPE friends:

Fostering the further development of population economics and encouraging young researchers to enter the field, the year 2005 was another successful year for ESPE. In June 2005 many of us had the pleasure to participate in our annual meeting in Paris. It was a great location for a wonderful event. Patricia Apps, serving as program chair, together with Alison Booth, Olympia Bover, Valérie Lechene and François-Charles Wolff made a fine selection of papers for presentation. The large number of papers submitted and their high quality demonstrate how well our society is developing.

Also, the local organizers, headed by Catherine Sofer and Olivia Ekert-Jaffé, contributed to making this an unforgettable meeting. Just remember the boat tour along the River Seine passing Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower. We thank them all for doing such a good job. The plenary lectures by David Card and Timothy Guinnane touched two important as well as challenging aspects of ESPE's main research areas, namely the assessment of the economic effects of immigration on the native population and the analysis of long-run demographic processes.

Next year’s conference will take place in Verona (Italy), from June 22 to June 24, 2006. Preparations are already underway. Barry Chiswick will serve as the program chair, Federico Perali as the local organizer. The submission deadline is February 1, 2006. Just as during last years, we want to particularly encourage PhD students to apply. Further details are available at www.espe.org.

Not only is the ESPE in good standing, but also the Journal of Population Economics which works in such close association to our society is doing fine as well. Finally, I would like to thank the ESPE Council, our Treasurer Regina Riphahn and Sara de la Rica who took over the responsibility to work as our Secretary this year. All of them made my job a pleasure. Over and above our own contributions, you as ESPE's members have made it a successful year for the society and an enjoyable year for me to serve as President. On behalf of the Council and Executive committee I thank you all for your continued support.

I am looking forward to seeing you all in Verona

Christoph M. Schmidt

The Nineteenth General Assembly of the European Society for Population Economics was held on Saturday, June 11, 2005 in Paris, Université Paris I. More than 100 members attended the meeting. The President, Christoph Schmidt, led the Assembly. He thanked those involved with making the Paris meeting a success, especially the local organiser Catherine Sofer as well as the scientific organiser Patricia Apps, who was assisted in the latter job by Alison Booth (Australian National University), Olympia Bover (Bank of Spain), Valérie Lechene (Oxford University) and François-Charles Wolff (University of Nantes). This years’ meeting was very successful, which can be seen by the highly acclaimed plenary lectures of David Card and Timothy W. Guinnane, but also by a very high quality of the contributed papers. 470 papers have been submitted, 210 of them have been accepted. Attendance at the meeting reached close to 240 participants.

The next conference of ESPE will be held in Verona June 22-24, 2006 at the "Palazzo della Gran Guardia", located at Piazza Brá, Verona. Barry Chiswick (University of Illinois at Chicago) will serve as the program chair, Federico Peralli, from the University of Verona will, will be the President of the Local Committee. All submissions should be sent by e-mail to the program committee at espe2006@web.econ.uic.edu. Submissions should include an abstract and, when possible, the paper itself. Preference will be given to submissions that include a complete paper, other things equal. Abstracts are to be submitted as plain text in the main body of the email; papers should be sent as attachments in either MS Word, .pdf, or .ps format. The submission deadline is February 1, 2006.

The former secretary of the Society, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer, reported on the recent elections. In total, 104 ballots were received. Patricia Apps from the University of Sydney was elected President. She will become President of the Society in 2006. Sara thanked the outgoing Council Members Barry Chiswick, Miles Corak, Sara de la Rica, Peter Kooreman, Paul Schultz, Nina Smith and Marianne Sundstrom for their service to the Society. She welcomed Alison Booth, Daniela Del Boca, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer and Christian Dustman as new members in the Council. The positions are effective from January 2005. Further information about the Society is to be found on the Web-page of the Society. (www.espe.org). The books of the Society (kept by the Treasurer Regina Riphahn) have been audited by René Böheim (University of Linz) and Mark Taylor (University of Essex), their positive report has been approved by the Assembly.

Finally, ESPE gave 10 fee waivers to the following PhD Students: Catia Batista, Yvonne Adema, Thorsten Hermann, Berna Demiralp, Nfn Maliki, Orgul Demet, Giacomo Di Giorgi, , Irina Paley, Sylke Viola, Hans Baumgartner

Christoph Schmidt, President.
Sara de la Rica, ESPE secretary.

The ESPE newsletter provides information on the society’s activities, on past, present and future events within or outside the Society’s framework. All members are kindly invited to use the ESPE Newsletter to make announcements of events in the field of population economics. Please send all contributions to the Secretary.

The Twentieth Annual Conference will take place on June 22-24, 2006, at the University of Verona, Italy. The aim of the Conference is to facilitate the exchange of research ideas and results across a range of fields, including the economics of the household, labour economics, public economics, demography, and health economics. Examples of research topics are: human capital investment, gender issues, intrahousehold distribution, aging and social security, taxation, population and economic growth, domestic and international migration, income distribution and redistribution within and between generations, technological change and the environment.

Barry Chiswick (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA) will serve as the program chair, Federico Perali as the local organizer. All submissions should be sent by e-mail to the program committee, espe2006@web.econ.uic.edu

Submissions should include an abstract and, when possible, the paper itself. Preference will be given to submissions that include a completed paper, other things being equal. Please send:

• an electronic version of an abstract (250 words maximum) in MS Word format for inclusion in the Book of Abstracts.
• an electronic version of the paper (or a detailed abstract) as attachment in pdf format, as one file (including tables and figures).

The submission deadline is February 1, 2006. Acceptance decisions will be communicated in March. We particularly encourage graduate students to apply. Waivers of the conference registration fee will be provided for 10 graduate students. To apply for a waiver the submission of a full paper together with a confirmation of student status by the dissertation supervisor is required. ESPE wants actively to increase participation from East European countries. Presenters from these countries who are within ten years of having completed their PhD can apply for a 50% reduction in the registration fee. Information on conference location, registration, and hotel reservations will be available at www.espe.org.

Barry R. Chiswick, UIC Distinguished Professor (since 2002), is also Research Professor (since 1978) and Head (since 1987) of the Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He is also Research Professor in the Department of Sociology and in the Survey Research Laboratory at UIC and Founding Director of the UIC Center for Economic Education (2000). In addition, he is Program Director for Migration Studies at IZA - Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn, Germany (since 2004).

Professor Chiswick received his Ph.D. with Distinction in Economics from Columbia Univer-sity (1967) and has held permanent and visiting appointments at UCLA, Columbia University, CU-NY, Stanford University, Princeton University, Hebrew University (Jerusalem), Tel Aviv University, University of Haifa, and the University of Chicago. From 1973 to 1977 he was Senior Staff Economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He is a former chairman of the American Statistical Association Census Advisory Committee, past president of the Midwest Economics Association and the Illinois Economics Association, and a consultant to numerous U.S. government agencies, as well as to the World Bank and other international organizations. He is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Population Economics and Research in Economics of the Household, and on the editorial boards of four additional academic journals.

Professor Chiswick has an international reputation for his research in Labor Economics, Human Resources, the Economics of Immigration, the Economics of Minorities, the Economics of Religion, and Income Distribution. He is recognized as having done the seminal research on the Economics of Immigration, and continues to be the leader in the field. His research has been published in 12 books and monographs and in over 140 scholarly journal articles and chapters in books, in addition to other publications. His latest book is The Economics of Immigration (Edward Edgar), 2005. His research is cited frequently in textbooks and in the academic literature (about 100 journal citations per year as reported in the Social Science Citation Index). In addition to numerous seminar and conference presentations in the United States, Professor Chiswick has lectured in 19 other countries.

Professor Chiswick has received numerous awards for his research, including an appointment as Distinguished Professor, a Fulbright (Research) Fellowship, the Senior University Scholar Award from the University of Illinois, the UIC College of Business Administration Alumni Award for Distinguished Research (first recipient), the Carleton C. Qualey Article Award from the Immigration History Society (first recipient), and the Milken Institute Award for Distinguished Economic Research. He also received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Brooklyn College (1999) for his research on immigrants and minorities.

Professor Chiswick is frequently interviewed by the print and electronic media on a range of labor market issues, especially immigration and minorities. He has published policy analyses of these issues in newspapers and magazines, has testified before Congress on pending legislation, and given public lectures to community groups on these and related issues. His policy recommendations regarding the reform of immigration law have influenced the public debate and legislation.

Two council members need to be elected. As we did last year, we implemented the E-voting system facilitates voting procedures for all members for whom we have e-mail addresses.

Voting is possible until February 15, 2006. Only ESPE members are allowed to vote.

The candidates and their biographical details are listed alphabetically below.

Thomas Bauer

Thomas Bauer studied economics at the University of Munich and received his degree as Diplom-Volkswirt in 1993. From 1993-1997 he worked as research associate at SELAPO, University of Munich and obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Munich for his dissertation on the labor market effects of immigration and migration policy in Germany. From 1997-1998 he visited the Rutgers University, USA, under the auspices of a Feodor-Lynen-Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation. In September 1998 he joined IZA as Senior Research Associate and became IZA Program Director for the Research Area "Mobility and Flexibility of Labor" in July 1999. Since 2003 he is professor of economics at the University of Bochum (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) and since 2004 member of the executive board of the RWI in Essen. He is a research affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) at the University of California-San Diego, USA.

His research interests include migration, labor and population economics, and applied microeconometrics. He has published several articles in collected volumes and in refereed journals including (among others) Labour Economics, Journal of Population Economics, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, International Migration Review, Applied Economics, and Economics of Education Review.

Simon Burgess

Simon Burgess is Professor of Economics at University of Bristol, and Director of CMPO: Centre for Market and Public Organisation. CMPO is an ESRC Research Centre, which also has core funded from the Leverhulme Trust. Simon completed his PhD in Oxford in 1987. Since then he has worked on unemployment dynamics, job security, poverty, economics of marriage, divorce and fertility, and neighbourhoods. As part of his work under CMPO he works on incentives in the public sector; education; role of markets and competition in education and health. For three years he was Dean of Research of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Bristol. He is Research Fellow of CEPR and IZA in Bonn, and was Director of an EU-funded network on a "Dynamic Approach to Europe’s Unemployment Problem".

Stephan Klasen

Stephan Klasen is a professor of economics at the University of Göttingen in Germany. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has held positions at the World Bank, the University of Cambridge, UK, and the University of Munich, Germany. His research interests focus on development economics, economics of gender, and economic demography.

Current research projects focos on causes, measurement, and consequences of gender inequality in developing countries, determinants of unemployment in developing countries, and the impact of demographic and labor market shocks on household behavior. He has published in the Journal of Economic History, Economic Development and Cultural Change, the Journal of Population Economics, Population and Development Review, the World Bank Economic Review, World Development, the Review of Income and Wealth, among others. He is currently the Co-Managing Editor of the Review of Income and Wealth.

Jan van Ours

Jan van Ours got his Ph.D. from Erasmus University Rotterdam. He worked at Free University Amsterdam, Erasmus University Rotterdam and he is now at Tilburg University. His research is much diversified. He works on unemployment dynamics, effects of policy interventions in the labor market, labor market and the firm, matching job seekers and vacancies, immigration and the labor market, empirical analysis of auctions, and the dynamics in drug use. His work has been published in journals like American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Labor Economics, Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Journal of Economic History among others. He is fellow of CentER, CEPR, William Davidson Institute and IZA. In 1996 he was awarded with the Hicks-Tinbergen medal of the European Economic Association.

• ESPRU-CHILD Workshop in Discrete Choice Labour Supply Models. December 8-9 2005 at the National University of Ireland, Galway (http://www.economics.nuigalway.ie/whatsnew/index.php)
• Interaction Within the Family: Collective Approach and Bargaining Models. Daniela del Boca (ChilD), Olivier Bargain (IZA), Denis Beninger (ZEW), Gianluca Violante (NYU), October 28-29 2005 (http://www.child-centre.it)

The 2006 meeting of the EALE will be organised by CERGE-EI, the Center for Economic Research in collaboration with The Institute of Economic Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University, the Czech Economic Society, The Czech National Bank and the EALE Secretariat in Maastricht. The conference will take place September 21 - 23 in Prague, Czech Republic.

You are invited to send in papers for submission. Papers are invited in any area of labour economics. A scientific committee will evaluate all submitted papers. Those who wish to present a paper are requested to send full (draft) papers to the EALE Secretariat, Maastricht, The Netherlands before March 1, 2006.

Papers accepted for presentation can be submitted for consideration for publication in the annual Conference Volume of the journal "Labour Economics", edited in 2006 by Professor Per-Anders Edin. Further information concerning submission rules and deadline will be given in the letter of acceptance.

Workshop sponsored by Research Network Flexibiliy in Heterogeneous Labour Markets, Homepage: www.zew.de/dfgflex

The workshop focuses on current empirical research on the determinants of wage growth and mobility over the life cycle and across generations. This includes analysis of life cycle career profiles, the effects of experience and tenure, job search, the time series trends in wages and wage differences, wage changes due to job changes, as well as intergenerational mobility.

• Deadline for paper submission: 6 January 2006
• Decision for acceptance made by: 1 February 2006

Scientific committee: Christian Dustmann (University College London), Bernd Fitzenberger (Goethe-University Frankfurt, ZEW), Kornelius Kraft (University of Dortmund, ZEW), Stephen Machin (University College London/London School of Economics)

Keynote speakers: Thomas Lemieux (UBC), Thomas E. MaCurdy (Stanford), Gary Solon (Michigan)

Please send a title and a paper as electronic copy to Birgit Herrmann bherrmann@wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de. Travel and accommodation for speakers of accepted papers (one speaker per paper) will be paid for. The conference is sponsored through the research network "Flexibility in heterogeneous labour markets" (Flexibilisierungspotenziale bei heterogenen Arbeitsmärkten) by the German Science Foundation.

The Conference will address all areas of migration with a particular emphasis on three issues: the impact immigration has on the host and source country economies, the assimilation and performance of immigrants in the host country labour markets, and the integration of immigrants across generation.

The Conference, jointly organised by CreAM (Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, UCL) and TARGET (Team for Advanced Research on Globalization, Education and Technology), will be interdisciplinary, but with a strong focus on economics and quantitative sociology.

Scientific Committee: Christian Dustmann (University College London), Thomas Lemieux (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), Ian Preston (University College Dondon).

Keynote Speakers: Monica Boyd (University of Toronto, Sociology), David Card (University of California at Berkeley, Economics), Richard Freeman (Harvard University, Economics).

Call for Papers:	Deadline for submission: 15th December 2005.
	Decision for acceptance made by: 20th January 2006.

Travel and Accomodation for Speakers of accepted papers or posters will be reimbursed. Submissions from graduate students are welcome.

Contact: Please send either paper or poster as an electronic copy to Albrecht Glitz at cream@ucl.ec.uk. More information at www.econ.ucl.ac.uk/cream/.

The IZA European Summer School in Labor Economics was created in 1998, as an annual event taking place at the conference center of Deutsche Post at the Ammersee Lake (near Munich) in Bavaria, Germany. The Summer School is supported by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the European Economic Association (EEA), the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE), and the European Society for Population Economics (ESPE). It is funded by the European Union, under the Sixth Framework Programme, Marie Curie Conferences and Training Courses.

The objective of the Summer School is to bring together a large number of PhD students and senior lecturers to study new areas in labor economics. Students have the opportunity to present their work and discuss ideas with established researchers in a relaxed and open atmosphere.

The School is open to advanced graduate students from European universities, or Europeans studying abroad, engaged in the preparation of a doctoral dissertation or approaching that stage. Around 35 students will be selected, based on their preparation to participate in advanced study on the subject.

Lecturers:
Peter Gottschalk (Boston College, USA) "Topics in Inequality and Mobility"
Gilles Saint-Paul (University of Toulouse, France) "Labor Market Models for the New Economy"

Funding:
Local expenses and traveling are covered.

Application:
Applications to participate should be submitted by January 20, 2006, using the online submission form at www.iza.org . Please submit your CV and an abstract for a potential presentation of your research work; a letter of support from your PhD supervisor should be sent by regular mail to
Ana Rute Cardoso (IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany).

Selected participants must deliver a complete paper by March 10, 2006.

The Luxembourg Income Study has made comparable over 140 large microdata sets containing comprehensive measures of income and economic well-being for a set of 30 modern industrialized welfare states. The LIS databank currently covers countries including: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The LIS Summer Workshop is a one-week pre- and post-doctoral workshop designed to introduce young scholars in the social sciences to comparative research in income distribution and social policy using the LIS database. The 2006 Summer Workshop, our 18th such event, will be held in Luxembourg. Arrival will be the evening of Sunday, June 25 and departure the afternoon of Saturday, July 1. Tuition of €11,200 will cover instructional materials, accommodations, and full board. Transportation to and from Luxembourg is the responsibility of the student. Applications are available from the LIS homepage at: www.lisproject.org/workshop.htm and are due by April 1, 2006. Please note that space is limited.

The language of instruction will be English. The course of study will include a mix of lectures and assistance and direction using the LIS database to explore a research issue chosen by the participant. Workshop faculty will include the entire LIS staff (including Timothy Smeeding, Overall Project Director; Janet Gornick, Associate Project Director, and Markus Jäntti, LIS Research Director) and other experienced LIS users.

For more information about the workshop, please contact:

Caroline de Tombeur
LIS Administrative Assistant
17, rue des Pommiers
L-2343 Luxembourg City
Luxembourg
caroline@lisproject.org

Or

Kati Foley
LIS Administrative Assistant
426 Eggers Hall
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13244-1020 USA
lisaa@maxwell.syr.edu

For information about the LIS Project, see www.lisproject.org.

Instructors:
Prof. Thomas F. Rutherford, University of Colorado
Prof. Volker Clausen, University of Duisburg-Essen

More details will be provided at www.gams.com/courses.htm.

Women at Work: An Economic Perspective, T. Boeri, D. Del Boca and C. Pissarides, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Covering employment and wage gender gaps, participation of women, fertility, and the welfare of children, this insightful volume discusses how the trend towards greater participation of women in labor markets interacts with gender differences in pay. It focuses on the scope for increasing the number of women in the labor force without negatively affecting the development of their children.

The need for this volume has become self evident. At the Spring 2000 Lisbon meeting of the European Council the Heads of Governments of the EU agreed to accelerate the greater participation of women in the labor market. However, neither in Lisbon nor in the subsequent Spring European Councils of the EU was it discussed how to achieve this target - and the trade-offs that would be involved in increasing the participation of women in paid employment.

Policies for increasing participation must involve some losers, or they would already have been implemented everywhere. If distributional considerations and policy trade-offs are ignored, it is only possible to set virtual targets, neglecting the reforms needed to achieve them. This book sets out a better informed policy debate about these issues, paving the way to more realistic targets and ways to achieve them.