Assignment:
NonCanada is a country unsure about its immigration policy. It is inhabited by a lone capitalist endowed with K units of generic capital, which he can transform one-to-one into a consumption good.
NonCanada has no labour to begin with. If the government adopts policy s, then the country admits up to measure Ws of willing skill-s immigrants (and only these immigrants), where indexes the skill level:
low (s = 1) or high (s = 2). The government announces that policy s will be adopted with probability where p1 +p2=1. Denote . Each skill-s immigrant can either work for the capitalist in NonCanada at the going wage ws or remain in his home country and earn there.
Each type of labor requires skill-specific capital, which the capitalist can produce one-to-one from his endowment of the generic capital. For any , for some coefficients and units of skill-s specific capital and hs units of skill-s labor can be transformed into
units of the consumption good.
Assume that Ws>(bs*Ks)/as and for all Before—and only before—the uncertainty about the immigration policy is resolved, the capitalist, an expected-profit maximizer, transforms some of his genericcapital into skill-specific capital.
Then the policy uncertainty is realized, the immigrant labor arrives, and the capitalist chooses how much labor to hire, at the prevailing Walrasian equilibrium ws. As a result, the capitalist’s expected profit is:
1. Explain the terms in the expression for the capitalist’s profit in the display above.
2. Solve for the capitalist’s optimal investment in capital as a function of p and the anticipated Walrasian-equilibrium wages (w1,w2).
3. Compute the anticipated Walrasian-equilibrium wages (w1,w2). What is the capitalist’s profit when no uncertainty about the immigration policy exists, that is, when ps = 1 for some
4. Show that there exists an uncertain immigration policy that is worse for the capitalist than any certain policy. That is, show that one can find a p such that
5. When can one conclude that eliminating uncertainty about the immigration policy constitutes a Pareto improvement in NonCanada?