R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics: Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population; Neighborhood CharacteristicsReturn

This study is a contribution to research into the relationship between commuting and life satisfaction. Our focus is on high school students. The research is based on a questionnaire survey among students in three countries: the Czech Republic, Italy and Slovenia. The analysis is conducted using six OLS regression models: three countries and both boys and girls in each country. The results show significant variance between the countries as far as the relation between commuting time and life satisfaction is concerned. A strong relation has been found only in the case of the Czech Republic. Possible reasons for this disparity include differences in the way various modes of transportation affect one's commuting experience, the role of climate and cultural aspects. In addition, variance has been found between the way boys and girls approach as well as experience commuting. Finally, our results confirm that commuting is a highly underestimated factor of happiness among students.

In this paper, we conduct the simple comparative static analysis of the environmental and economic effects of the government and producer services sector's training of rural-urban migrants. We mainly focus our attention on environmental issues and reach the following conclusions: When the government lowers the interest rate of training loans, environmental conditions will worsen. However, when the producer services sector increases the unit cost of training rural labour, the opposite effect occurs, and environmental conditions will improve. In addition, we discuss the conditions under which a government reduction in the interest rate of training loans will lead to the reduction of pollution damage to agricultural production and a decrease in social utility.

In the process of European integration, regions close to a border are especially affected by labour market liberalisation. Using data from the IAB employment subsample (IABS) and the employment register (BeH) for the period before and after the opening of the border between Germany and the Czech Republic (1980-2001) I shed light on the development of wages. Both German employees and Czech commuters in the western German borderland of Bavaria are compared to other domestic and foreign workers. At the beginning of the 1990s, German legislation was relatively unrestrictive, so that it was quite easy for Czech workers to obtain a work permit beyond the border. Most of them had only low education. More than 5% of the eastern Bavarian male, low-skilled workforce was reported Czech in the early 1990s. Surprisingly, precisely in this period German employees seem to have benefited from integration, but suffered in the years afterwards, when regulations on labour permits for commuters were far stricter.