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

ESPE-Office Professor Sara de la Rica, Department of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis II,
University of the Basque Country, Avda. Lehendakari Aguirre, 84,
48015 Bilbao, Spain. Telephone: + 34-946013783 Fax: + 34-946013774
E-mail: sara.delarica@ehu.es

It was a great honor to be elected President of ESPE for 2007 and preside over its 21st annual conference. I have been involved in ESPE for many years, having presented papers at numerous meetings, served on the council, delivered a keynote plenary session lecture, and currently serving as an Associate Editor of its journal, the Journal of Population Economics.

I am indebted to Klaus Zimmermann for introducing me to ESPE. ESPE has been a wonderful experience. I always benefit greatly from the helpful comments I receive on my ESPE paper presentations, as well as from the presentations of papers given by others. Equally, if perhaps not more, important has been the informal conversations in the corridors and at the lunches and dinners at the ESPE meetings. Moreover, I value the friendships that I have made over the years, particularly with the European scholars who I might otherwise have not met.

ESPE has grown and developed into a very important scholarly society over the past 21 years and given the energy, vitality and creativity that I have seen, it will continue to grow in importance and influence. This is, of course, a result of the very high caliber of the papers and presentations at the annual conference, as well as the papers published in the Journal of Population Economics.

The 2007 annual conference was held on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, within site of Chicago's downtown business district ("The Loop"). This is only the second time ESPE has met outside of Europe. The two keynote talks were presented by Nobel Laureate Gary S. Becker (University of Chicago) on "Human Capital and Health" and by Laurence Iannaccone (George Mason University) on the "Economics of Religion". My Presidential Address was on "The Economics of Language." These three topics themselves demonstrate the broad reach of population economics. While there were sessions on more traditional areas in population economics, the 43 sessions included topics as diverse as Human Capital, Family Economics, Discrimination, Migration, Child Outcomes, Crime and Retirement. That the theoretical and empirical methodology and public policy relevance of population economics can span and integrate such an array of topics is itself a credit to the field and its practitioners, and hence to ESPE.

The 2007 conference was not all hard work. There were enjoyable "theme" meals. There was, for example, the "Thanksgiving in June Dinner" which featured foods native to the New World, including turkey, sweet potatoes, corn and cranberries, that are traditional at the American Thanksgiving Day Dinner (normally in November). On another evening we went on the Architectural River Cruise along the Chicago River adjacent to Navy Pier, the first home of UIC. We learned all about the history of Chicago, its many architectural wonders and the river, which now flows backwards!

The success of the ESPE meetings depends crucially on the enthusiastic activities of two committees. President-elect Christian Dustmann chaired the Program Committee, consisting of 21 members, which put together the 43 sessions. I chaired the Local Arrangements Committee and I appreciate the excellent support provided by the UIC Economics Department office staff and student workers.

Overall, there were 414 papers submitted for possible presentation and 172 papers were presented at the meeting. There were just under 200 registrants at this year’s meeting.

I personally want to thank each and every participant in the 21st Annual Conference of the European Society for Population Economics. Each participant’s contribution helped to make it a success.

Now that these meetings are history, we look forward to the next annual conference, in London, with program chair Jan van Ours and the Local Arrangements Committee Chair (and my successor as President) Christian Dustmann. I look forward to seeing you in London!

Barry R. Chiswick

The Twenty-First General Assembly of the European Society for Population Economics was held on Saturday, June 16, 2007 at the University of Illinois (Chicago). Nearly 200 members attended the ESPE meeting and more than half attended the General Assembly. The Presi-dent, Barry Chiswick, chaired the Assembly. He thanked all those involved in making the Chicago meeting such a success, with special thanks going out to Carol Martel and Jin Man Lee for their work on the local organising committee, as well as to scientific program chairman Christian Dustmann and all the members of the scientific program committee. Barry Chiswick also thanked Regina Riphahn, the ESPE treasurer, for her 6-years of service.

This year’s meeting was very successful, due both to the warmly received plenary lectures given by Gary Becker and Laurence Iannaconne, and to the high quality of the pa-pers contributed. 414 papers were submitted, 230 of which were accepted. There were around 50 drop-outs. There were 180 participants at the meeting.

The next ESPE Annual Conference will be held on June 19-21, 2008 at the University College London (UCL). Jan van Ours (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) will serve as the program chair, Christian Dustmann, from University College London, will chair the Local Committee. The Call for Papers will announce the electronic address to which abstracts and papers must be sent. Preference will be given to submissions that include a completed paper. The submission deadline is February 1, 2008.

The secretary of the Society, Sara de la Rica, reported on the results of the elections held during the autumm of 2006. More than 130 ballots were received. Christian Dutmann was elected President for 2008 and Jan van Ours was elected President-elect for 2009. Sara explained that in the 2007 elections voters had to cast ballots for two Presidents-elect (for the next and next-but-one years) due to the existence of a timing mismatch. From now on, the ballot every autumn will be to elect the President-elect for the next-but-one year. Sara thanked the outgoing Council Members, Klaus Zimmerman and Valerie Lechene, for their service to the Society. She also welcomed James Albretch, Deborah Cobb-Clarke and Steve Machin as the new members of the Council. Their positions are effective as of January 2007. The accounts 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. Further information about the Society is to be found on its Web-page at www.espe.org.

Finally, ESPE gave 10 fee waivers to the 2007 ESPE meeting to the following PhD Students: Katrine Loken (Norway), Tommaso Frattini (UK), Simen Markussen (Norway), Marta Lopez-Yurda (Netherlands), Alfred Garloff (Germany), Michel Dimou (France), Olga Sorokina (US), Maria Nieves Valdés (Spain), Martin Halla (Austria) and Marcela Umana Aponte (UK). There were 58 applications, and waivers were granted on the basis of the grades obtained in the refereeing process.

Barry Chiswick, ESPE 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 Twenty Second Annual Conference will take place on June 19-21, 2008, at the University College London, UK. 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 to-pics are: human capital investment, gender issues, intrahousehold distribution, aging and social security, taxation, population and economic growth, domestic and international migration, inco-me distribution and redistribution within and between generations, technological change and the environment.

Jan van Ours (University of Tilburg, The Netherlands) will serve as the program chair and Christian Dustmann as the local organizer. The keynote speakers at ESPE2008 will be Daron Acemoglu (MIT) and Pierre-André Chiappori (Columbia). The presidential address will be given by Christian Dustmann (UCL).

The conference will provide the opportunity to present papers. Papers and abstracts should be submitted electronically using the on-line submission form on the conference web-page, http://www.econ.ucl.ac.uk/espe2008/. ESPE2008 will for the first time also have poster sessions.

Submissions for presentation should include an abstract and, when possible, the paper itself in pdf format (one single file, including tables and figures). Preference will be given to submissions that include a completed paper. Submissions for posters should include an abstract and if possible a paper. Please indicate on the electronic submission form whether you wish to present a paper or a poster.

The submission deadline is February 1, 2008. Acceptance decisions will be communicated in March. We particularly encourage graduate students to apply. Waivers of the conference registra-tion fee will be provided for 10 graduate students. It is necessary that students apply for the waiver in the on-line submission and that his/her supervisor confirms the student status. 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 the conference web page.

Tim Hatton is Professor of Economics at the University of Essex and at the Australian National University. He has been Head of the Economics Department at both universities and is a fellow of the CEPR and the IZA. He has published numerous articles on labour markets and policy from the nineteenth century to the present. The topics include long run variations in equilibrium unemployment, historical analysis of women’s work, the effects of minimum wages, and poverty and the welfare state in Interwar Britain. He is currently working on the health and heights of children in the 1930s.

Over the last decade he has published extensively on the determinants and effects of international migration. His most recent book (co-authored with Jeffrey G. Williamson) is Global Migration and the World Economy: Two Centuries of Policy and Performance (MIT Press, 2006). His current interests in this area include the analysis of migration and immigration policy since the 1970s and the political economy of refugee and asylum policy, especially in the European Union. His latest work on the international governance of immigration policies, "Should we have a WTO for International Migration?" appeared in Economic Policy, April 2007.

Thomas Bauer is currently professor of economics at the University of Bochum (Ruhr-Universität Bochum). He 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. In July 1997 he 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 Thomas Bauer 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. In 2004, he became a member of the executive board of the RWI in Essen. Thomas Bauer is research affiliate of the IZA in Bonn and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) at the University of California-San Diego, USA.

His research interests include migration, population economics, labour economics and applied microeconometrics. He has published several articles in collected volumes and in journals such as Economic Journal, Economica, Health Economics, Labour Economics, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Applied Economics, and Economics of Education Review.

Sara de la Rica (PhD in Economics by the University of the Basque Country (1991). Actually, she is an Associate professor of Economics at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). Her research interest is focused on applied microeconometrics to the Labour Market. Her current research is focused on two main issues: Gender wage differentials and Immigration. Her work has been published in Journal of Human Resources, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Economica, Journal of Population Economics, Contributions to Economic Analysis from Berkeley Electronic Press Journals, among others.

Sara is an Associate Fellow at IZA since 2005 and a researcher at FEDEA in Madrid (Spain).
Personal website: http://www.ehu.es/SaradelaRica

As we did last year, we will implement the E-voting system facilitates voting procedures for all members for whom we have e-mail addresses. To be valid, it must be returned to the office of the Secretary before November 30, 2007. The candidates and their biographical details are listed alphabetically below.

Alison Booth is Professor of Economics at the Universities of Essex and the Australian National University, and a Research Fellow of the CEPR and the IZA. She obtained her PhD from the London School of Economics and is currently in the last year of a 3-year term as President of the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE).

Booth was Editor-in-chief of Labour Economics from 1999-2004. She has worked in a number of different areas, including trade unions, monopsonistic competition, child quality/quantity tradeoffs, fertility, gender issues in pay determination and employment, temporary work and part-time employment, work-related training, employment protection, and academic labour markets. She is the author of The Economics of the Trade Union, published by Cambridge University Press and has published numerous journal articles in outlets such as the European Economic Review, Economic Journal, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Review of Economics and Statistics; Journal of the European Economic Association; the Journal of Labor Economics and the Journal of Population Economics. She has received research grants from the Australian Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, and the Economic and Social Research Council.

Her CV can be found at: http://www.essex.ac.uk/economics/people/staff/albooth.asp

Daniela Del Boca (Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988) is Professor of Economics at the University of Turin, Carlo Alberto Fellow and Director of CHILD. Her work has focused mainly on household labor market decisions, family formation, and fertility, with a particular emphasis on the role of institutions in shaping these behaviors. Her articles have appeared in such journals as the American Economic Review, Journal of Human Resources, Labour, Journal of Population Economics, Labour Economics, Review of Income and Wealth, Review of Economics of the Household. She has recently edited several books, among which "Women at work: an economic perspective" (with Tito Boeri and Chris Pissarides) Oxford University Press in 2005 and "Social Policies, Labor Markets and Motherhood" with (C. Wetzels) Cambridge University Press in 2007.

She is Co-editor of Labour and Associate Editor of Review of Economics of the Household and Rivista di Studi Familiari and the online journal Lavoce.info. Fellow at the Center for European Studies (CES) at NYU, and Fellow the Institute for the Study of Labour ( IZA) and the Italian Academy at Columbia University. She has been President of the European Population Economics in 2000. In March 2007 she has received an Award for her research on Family Economics from the Italian President.

Sandra McNally is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics. She is also Director of the Education Programme at CEP and a Deputy Director of the Centre for the Economics of Education. Her research relates to the economics of education. Recent papers include evaluation of government policies; analysis of the gender gap in educational attainment; the impact of computers on pupil performance; and labour market returns to higher education. She has published papers in the Economic Journal and the Journal of the European Economic Association. More recently, she has had papers accepted for publication in the Journal of Labor Economics and the Journal of Public Economics.
She is also a Research Fellow of IZA.

Further information can be found on the following website:
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/staff/person.asp?id=743

Erik Plug is currently Professor in Family Economics in the Amsterdam School of Economics at the University of Amsterdam. Previously he held positions at Erasmus University Rotterdam and University of Wageningen. He is further a research fellow at the Tinbergen Institute, and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). His research is empirically orientated, covers the areas of education, family and labor economics, and is widely published in, among others, American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Health Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Population Economics, Labour Economics, and Quarterly Journal of Economics.

His website is htt://plug.economists.nl/.

Dan-Olof Rooth completed his doctorate in Economics at Lund University in Sweden in 1999 with his thesis on "Refugee Immigrants in Sweden". Since then he is also a member of the Department of Economics at Kalmar University, Sweden. Dan-Olof has published in journals such as Journal of Population Economics, International Migration, Economic Letters, Labour Economics and Economic Journal. His research interests include issues in Economic Psychology, Ethnic Discrimination and Migration as well as more general research on labor market opportunities of immigrants. Currently he is running a research group in Kalmar focusing on implicit attitudes/stereotypes (from social psychology) and labor market discrimination. Dan-Olof is also a research associate at IZA and CReAM.

Personal website: http://www.bbs.hik.se/forskning/rooth/

Arthur van Soest is professor of Econometrics at Tilburg University and adjunct economist at RAND, California. He was full-time at RAND in 2003 and 2004, but spent most of his career in Tilburg, the Netherlands, where he also was an assistant and associate professor. From 1992 until 1997, he had a research fellowship of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has a Ph.D. in Econometrics, also from Tilburg University, where his advisors were Arie Kapteyn and Peter Kooreman.

His research interests cover micro-econometrics, labour economics (participation and labour supply, wage structures, retirement), consumption and saving behaviour (income expectations, demand systems, portfolio choice), economic psychology (risk aversion, time preferences, anchoring, non-expected-utility models), economics of ageing and health (work disability, health and socio-economic status, retirement expectations and decisions), and development economics (formal and informal sector work; child mortality). Arthur van Soest is one of the scientific directors on Netspar, the Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement in the Netherlands. He is also affiliated with IZA (Bonn), OSA (Tilburg) and DIW (Berlin). His personal web-site can be found at http://center.uvt.nl/staff/soest/index.html.

Rudolf Winter-Ebmer Professor of Labor Economics, Department of Economics, University of Linz, Austria and Research Professor at Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna
www.econ.jku.at/winter

Born 1961, Austrian citizen, Studies in Mathematics, Business and Economics, PhD (1991) and Habilitation (1996) in Economics, University of Linz.
Visiting positions or teaching positions: University of California, Berkeley 1995-96, University of Graz 1998, University of Zurich 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, Université de Paris II 2000, University of Innsbruck 2001, University of Vienna, 2003.

Research Fellow with the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) London, since 1992.
Research Fellow with the Institute for the Future of Labor (IZA), Bonn, since 1999.
Consultant for the World Bank in program evaluation, 1998-2000, 2004. Project coordinator for Austrian SHARE program 2000-.

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 World Net 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).

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:

Raquel Fernández (New York University): "Family, Culture, Work and Inequality"

Barry Chiswick (University of Illinois at Chicago): "The Economics of Immigration: What We Really Know, What We Only Think We Know, and What We Know We Do Not Know"

Funding:
Local expenses and traveling are covered.

Application:
Applications to participate should be submitted by February 7, 2008, using the online submission form at http://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 must 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 April 7, 2008.

The 20th annual Conference will take place on September 18-20, 2008, at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Amsterdam. This meeting will be organised by the Department of Economics and Business Amsterdam School of Economics (http://www.ase.uva.nl/asehome/home.cfm), and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS ; http://www.uva-aias.net/), both of the University of Amsterdam.

The aim of the conference is to facilitate the exchange of research ideas and results across a range of fields in Labour Economics. You are invited to submit papers for this conference according to the list of themes below. A scientific committee will evaluate all submitted papers.

Special conference Issue Labour Economics
Papers accepted for presentation can be submitted again for publication in the annual Conference Volume of the journal "Labour Economics" edited in 2008 by Uwe Sunde. Further information concerning submission rules and deadline regarding this procedure of a ‘Special Issue submission’, will be given in the letter of acceptance.

The electronic submission form is now open for your paper contribution and will close after the deadline of March 1, 2008. The link below will lead you automatically trough the electronic process of the paper submission. To each paper an abstract must be added. Both your abstract and complete paper can be submitted during the electronic submission process. The abstracts of the accepted papers will be published in a Book of Abstracts. Please complete all the required fields and enclose your complete paper as one pdf file (no tables, figures etc. as separate files). You will receive a confirmation e-mail message after your registration has been completed. If you are not receiving this message or you receive an empty message then please contact us at eale@roa.unimaas.nl. Acceptance decisions will be communicated by the end of April, 2008. The registration site will be open from May 1, 2008. The accepted papers will be made available for downloading from the conference site. Your paper revisions can be uploaded anytime and should be sent to the EALE secretariat before 1 September 2008.

EALE Young Economist Award
The EALE grants an award of € 300 for an outstanding paper selected by the Scientific Committee to researchers who have completed their Ph.D. less than 3 years ago. Only single-authored papers are eligible for the award. If you meet the eligibility conditions and wish to be considered for the award, please tick the corresponding box on the submission form.

For questions, please contact us at eale@roa.unimaas.nl.

Organizers: Amelie Constant (DIW DC and IZA) and Barry R. Chiswick (UIC and IZA)
Place: IZA, Schaumburg-Lippe-Str. 5-9, Bonn, Germany
Date: May 19-23, 2008Submission Deadline: February 15, 2008
Notification of Acceptance: March 17, 2008
Complete Papers due: April 21, 2008

We are delighted to announce the 5th Annual Migration Meeting (AM2), which will be in conjunction with the IZA Topic Week this year. We seek high quality academic work that extends, enriches, refines, and challenges our understanding of the broad array of issues related to migration. We encourage submissions from junior researchers. Researchers are expected to present their best ongoing cutting-edge work. The 5th AM2 will be organized in a manner designed to foster interaction and exchange of ideas among the participants in a relaxed atmosphere. The highlight of the meeting is the 5th Julian Simon Keynote Lecture. The Topic Week includes several migration events. Participants are expected to participate in the entire 5-day topic week conference and debate migration issues.

Researchers desiring to present their work at this meeting are encouraged to submit a complete paper (extended abstracts will also be considered) electronically by February 15, 2007. Junior researchers should also submit their vita. Electronic submissions are required. Check the IZA website for updates and submission details.

In the case of multiple authors, please indicate the correspondence author who would be presenting the paper.Papers/abstracts must include:

• Title of presentation
• Three to five key words and JEL codes
• Contact person’s name, title, organization affiliation, address, telephone, fax number, and email address
• Co-author(s) names and affiliations

Submissions should indicate willingness or not to participate in the entire topic week. It is expected that 18 papers will be accepted for presentation over the 5-day AM2 and Topic Week. Papers will be considered for a one-hour session, including discussants’ comments and audience participation. Those authors who are invited are expected to participate in the entire topic week conference.

More details at http://www.gredeg.cnrs.fr/Colloques/HDTW/How-do-they-work.htm

The Department of Economics of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration has a vacancy for an:

Tasks:

• Contribute to the teaching activities in the Department of Economics. Members of the Department are expected to be able to teach a wide range of topics, but in the open position the focus is on micro-economics and applied-econometrics courses in the bachelor and graduate programs. This includes the possible development or redesign of courses.
• Carry out top research that is publishable in excellent international scientific journals. Co-supervise PhD students. Actively participate in our research team of applied econometricians and labor and health economists, and in the PhD Graduate School "Tinbergen Institute".
• Contribute to management tasks at the Department.
• Acquire external research funding at science foundations or other institutions.

• PhD in economics or econometrics, with publications in good international scientific journals. Given the high quality and international profile of the empirical research projects carried out at the Department, it is important that the candidate has experience with empirical research and that he/she has an international research outlook.
• Teaching experience, with good evaluations. The candidate should (be willing to quickly) master the Dutch language.

The position is in principle full-time. The gross salary will depend on experience and qualifications. Salary for full time position: minimum EUR 4242 gross per month (salary scale 13), maximum salary EUR 5670 gross per month (salary scale 14). The appointment is initially for a period of two years, which will be extended for an indefinite period of time in case of a positive performance. For further information about the position please contact the chairperson of the recruitment committee Professor Gerard J. van den Berg, Head of the Department, at +31-20-5986132 or gberg@feweb.vu.nl.

Application procedure:

Applicants should send a CV to F.A. Snijders, Managing Director of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, preferably by e-mail (vacature@feweb.vu.nl) or otherwise by surface mail (Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands). Please respond before December 10, 2007.

Social Policies, Labour Markets and Motherhood: A Comparative Analysis of European Countries, Edited by Daniela del Boca (University of Turin, Collegio Carlo Alberto and CHILD) and Cécile Wetzels Universiteit van Amsterdam). Cambridge University Press 2007