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My guests for this episode are Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew Forrester of the Cato Institute. Our topic is a working paper they recently published titled How Mass Immigration Affects Countries with Weak Economic Institutions: A Natural Experiment in Jordan. The abstract reads as follows:

Saddam Hussein’s unexpected 1990 invasion of Kuwait forced 300, 000 Kuwaitis of Palestinian descent to flee into Jordan. By 1991, this large exogenous population shock increased Jordan’s population by about 10 percent. Jordanian law allowed these refugees to work, live, and vote in Jordan immediately upon entry. The refugees did not bring social capital that eroded Jordan’s institutions. On the contrary, we find that Jordan’s economic institutions substantially improved in the decade after the refugees arrived. Our empirical methodology employs difference-in-differences and the synthetic control method, both of which indicate that the significant improvement in Jordanian economic institutions would not have happened to the same extent without the influx of refugees. Our case study indicates that the refugee surge was the main mechanism by which Jordan’s economic institutions improved over this time.

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The post Refugee Waves, Mass Immigration, and Jordan with Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew Forrester appeared first on The Economics Detective.

My guests for this episode are Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew Forrester of the Cato Institute. Our topic is a working paper they recently published titled How Mass Immigration Affects Countries with Weak Economic Institutions: A Natural Experiment in Jordan. The abstract reads as follows:

Saddam Hussein’s unexpected 1990 invasion of Kuwait forced 300, 000 Kuwaitis of Palestinian descent to flee into Jordan. By 1991, this large exogenous population shock increased Jordan’s population by about 10 percent. Jordanian law allowed these refugees to work, live, and vote in Jordan immediately upon entry. The refugees did not bring social capital that eroded Jordan’s institutions. On the contrary, we find that Jordan’s economic institutions substantially improved in the decade after the refugees arrived. Our empirical methodology employs difference-in-differences and the synthetic control method, both of which indicate that the significant improvement in Jordanian economic institutions would not have happened to the same extent without the influx of refugees. Our case study indicates that the refugee surge was the main mechanism by which Jordan’s economic institutions improved over this time.

(more…)

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The post Refugee Waves, Mass Immigration, and Jordan with Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew Forrester appeared first on The Economics Detective.

My guest for this episode is Bryan Caplan of George Mason University. We discuss his latest book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, in which he argues that the social value of education is negative.

This may seem paradoxical given that more educated individuals tend to earn more than less educated individuals. This can be explained in two ways: First, people who get more education were likely more skilled in the first place; in other words, there is a selection effect. Second, people who are already skilled can use education to demonstrate their skill to employers; economists call this signalling. (more…)

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The post The Case Against Education with Bryan Caplan appeared first on The Economics Detective.