Recent European Legislation on immigration has revealed a particular paradox on migration policies. On the one hand, the trend of recent legislation points to the increasing closure of frontiers (OECD 1999, 2001, 2004), also by using immigration quotas. On the other hand, there is an increase of regularization, i.e., European policies are becoming less tight. Our aim here is to study these counterbalanced and opposite policies in European immigration legislation in a unified framework . To do this, we have used a real option approach to migration choice that assumes that the decision to migrate can be described as an irreversible investment decision where quotas represent an upper bound limit. Our results show that the paradox of counterbalancing immigration policies is not odd but it could be in line with an optimal policy to control migration inflow. In particular, we show that if the government controls the information related to the immigration quota system it could delay the mass entry of immigrants maintaining, in the long run, the required immigration stock and controlling the flows in the short-run.

This paper uses historical monthly temperature level data for a panel of 114 countries to identify the effects of within year temperature level variability on productivity growth in five different macro regions, i.e., (1) Africa, (2) Asia, (3) Europe, (4) North America and (5) South America. We find two primary results. First, higher intra-annual temperature variability reduces (increases) productivity in Europe and North America (Asia). Second, higher intra-annual temperature variability has no significant effects on productivity in Africa and South America. Additional empirical tests indicate also the following: (1) rising intra-annual temperature variability reduces productivity (even thought less significantly)in both tropical and non-tropical regions, (2) inter-annual temperature variability reduces (increases) productivity in North America (Europe) and (3) winter and summer inter-annual temperature variability generates a drop in productivity in both Europe and North America. Taken together, these findings indicate that temperature variability shocks tend to have stronger adverse economic effects among richer economies. In a production economy featuring long-run productivity and temperature volatility shocks, we quantify these negative impacts and find welfare losses of 2.9% (1%) in Europe (North America).

An increasing number of firms in OECD countries are obtaining certification as Socially Responsible. Literature is sensitive in testing whether there is a relation between firm performance and Social Responsibility certification. In order to overcome problems related to the multiplicity of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) definitions and certifications, our work implements a CSR index based on the intersection between two of the three main international indices (Domini 400 Social Index, Dow Jones Sustainability World Index and FTSE4Good Index). By using this database in a panel framework, our work shows that among Corporate Performance Measures (CPF), Market Value Added (MVA) is affected by a firm’s social responsible behaviour and certification. The results support the idea that CSR firms have better long-run performance. Thanks to the reputation effect, they achieve higher sales volumes and profits and a reduction in long-run costs: these effects compensate the costs due to the certification.