A positive wage-firm size relationship is well documented in the empirical
literature in industrial organization and labor economics. Firm size seems to
proxy various unobserved determinants such as job satisfaction, monitoring
costs, more complex technologies and worker participation in monopoly profits.
It is generally argued that, the greater the possibility of controlling for
these latent factors, the less likely that a significant size effect will
appear. This paper attempts to distinguish firm size from other wage
determinants for a rich data source for West Germany and demonstrates the
persistence of the size premium.

The main objective of this paper is to propose a systematic approach to empirically analyse the relationship between sending remittances and the utility of migrants, as proxied by their subjective well-being (SWB). Using data from a new survey on China, we estimate models in which a SWB measure is regressed on the level of remittances, finding a sizeable positive correlation. The estimates vary with the socio-economic characteristics of migrants, migration experience and the diversity of family arrangements. As a complementary objective, we use SWB measures to elicit the motivations behind remittances, finding evidence that both altruistic and contractual motivations are at work among rural-to-urban migrants in China.

This paper takes a global, long-run perspective on the recent debate about secular stagnation, which has so far mainly focused on the short term. The analysis is motivated by observing the interplay between the economic and demographic transition that has occurred in the developed world over the past 150 years. To the extent that high growth rates in the past have partly been the consequence of singular changes during the economic and demographic transition, growth is likely to become more moderate once the transition is completed. At the same time, a similar transition is on its way in most developing countries, with profound consequences for the development prospects in these countries, but also for global comparative development. The evidence presented here suggests that long-run development dynamics have potentially important implications for the prospects of human and physical capital accumulation, the evolution of productivity and the question of secular stagnation.

This paper investigates the effect of drinking arsenic contaminated water on mental health. Drinking water with an unsafe arsenic level for a prolonged period can lead to arsenicosis and associated illness. Based on rich and newly collected household survey data from Bangladesh, we construct several measures for arsenic contamination that include the actual arsenic level in the respondent’s tubewell (TW), and past institutional arsenic test results as well as their physical and mental health. In contrast to the existing literature, we provide objective measures of arsenic exposure and take advantage of the quasi-randomness of arsenic distribution to account for the potential endogeneity of developing arsenicosis related to possible selection of certain households into using safe or unsafe sources of water. We take the pre-1999 use of TW as an instrument and structural modelling as alternatives for robustness checks. We find that suffering from an arsenicosis symptom is strongly negatively related to mental health, even more so than from other illnesses. While we cannot disentangle the specific mechanisms that drive the results, we do provide a framework for thinking about the role that physiological, social, and psychological factors may play on it.