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The largest flow of scientific talent in the world is the migration of international students to universities in industrialized countries. We use the opening of China in 1978 to estimate this flow's causal effect on the productivity of their professors in the United States. Our identification relies on both the suddenness of China's opening and on a key feature of scientific production: intra-ethnic collaboration. The increased access that Chinese-American advisors had to a new talent pool led to an increase in their productivity, in both coauthorships and solo-authored papers. Comparable non-Chinese advisors mentored fewer non-Chinese students and published fewer papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most developed countries, students have to choose a major field of study during high school. This is an important decision because it largely determines subsequent educational and occupational choices. Using French data, this paper reveals that enrollment at a more selective high school, with higher-achieving peers, has no impact on boys, but a strong impact on girls' choices: they turn away from scientific fields and settle for less competitive ones. Our results are not consistent with two commonly advanced explanations for gender differences in field of study—namely, disparities in prior academic preparation and in sensitivity to rank in class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that new Federal programs for regional economic development stress productivity as a criterion for the regional allocation of Federal funds. What have been surveyed turns out to be a sizeable number of partial indicants of growth potential in employment, differing in numerous ways. All the data might be described as indicants of disequilibrium, with equilibrium attainable by growth in employment. But in some cases, such as local market deficiencies, the likely amount of employment growth can be roughly estimated. In others, such as a positive competitive shift or high rates of return on investment, only investigation of area and industry in some depth could hope to provide an estimate of the employment increment resulting in equilibrium. The various indicants in combination complement and reinforce one another. All they can do, however, is serve as criteria for partitioning all defined areas into several groups, offering respectively much better and much poorer growth prospects. For such subgroups of widely differing prospects it is possible to say that federal development expenditures of an incremental nature would have greater payoffs in one than in another.

The article focuses on benefit taxation in Colombia. The valorization tax as it exists in Colombia, particularly in Medellin, seems to have a useful but limited role to play in economic development, it is effective in financing certain specialized types of public investment at a certain stage in the economic development of a country. For the tax to be useful the country must have reached a stage where urbanization is proceeding at a rapid rate and large modern cities are being formed. The country must also have developed capable administrators, real estate men, and engineers who can handle the complicated machinery of the valorization tax. City planning must also have become feasible. Yet the country must not have yet reached the stage of maturity where capital markets have developed which can take over the job from the valorization tax and where the city has become so large and intricate that the relation between public investment and increases in site value is too complex for valorization financing to work. Colombians feel that the experience in Medellin and elsewhere in the last twenty years has established both the general principles and the specialized methods needed for successful valorization programs.

This article focuses on the regional economic development objectives and subsidization of local industry around the world. While the concern of national policymakers with the problem of lagging regions is of recent origin in most countries, the problem itself is an old one. It is therefore not surprising that many state and local governments as well as private-interest groups in the afflicted regions have traditionally attempted to attract industry by offering financial assistance of one form or another. Exemption from local property taxes, provision of site and building at nominal long-term rentals, and low-interest loans are just a few examples of the forms which local subsidization of industry may take. Not only has local subsidization been widely practiced for a long time, it has also been widely condemned. Economists have generally rejected it as an unwarranted interference with the efficiency of resource allocation. Not only has local subsidization been widely practiced for a long time, it has also been widely condemned. Eonomists have generally rejected it as an unwarranted interference with the efficiency of resource allocation.

Analyzing cross sectional return migration data for a specific depressed rural area is one method of evaluating the efficiency of the migration process. The employment experience of those who did not remain in the industrial area may give information about the least successful migrants. The primary hypothesis for return migration was the ability of the migrant to obtain only marginal employment in the industrial area. The data of this study appear to support this hypothesis. Measures to improve the assimilation process into industrial society of this group of return migrants would also be expected to facilitate the migration process for the pool of future entrants into the industrial society from rural depressed areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]