This paper criticizes the view that altruism either increases the benefits of group interactions or improves the allocation of resources within families. The authors identify a variety of circumstances in which members of a group would prefer to interact with less altruistic individuals and in which the efficiency of resource allocation is inversely related to the prevailing degree of altruism. Reasons that altruism might be a counter-productive social force include 1) it can alter the social utility possibility frontier in surprising and sometimes unfortunate ways; 2) it can entail exploitability causing family members to behave in ways that leave all parties worse off; 3) altruists may take inefficient actions to preempt exploitation; and 4) family members may establish efficient resource allocation by punishing selfish behavior. A rise in the level of altruism may lead to the exclusion of certain punishment strategies on the grounds of credibility. 1 general positive result is that sufficiently high levels of altruism almost always lead to efficient resource allocation. One should not necessarily expect to find strong altruistic linkages between spouses nor should altruism necessarily contributed to marital stability. In addition to the connections between this work and the literature on family behavior this analysis has broader implications concerning the role of altruism in society and the evolution of social conscience.

This paper reviews selected theoretical and empirical developments in the field of labor migration economics. The migration behavior of individuals differs in accordance with their perceived relative deprivation; those who are relatively more deprived tend to have stronger incentive to migrate than those who are relatively less deprived. Moreover a reference group characterized by more income inequality is likely to generate more relative deprivation. Highly skilled workers are also more likely to migrate. Migration decisions are often made jointly by the migrant and nonmigrant with a contractual arrangement regarding the sharing of costs and returns. The exchange of commitments to share income provides coinsurance. Of particular interest are the determinants of the speed of adoption of migration as an innovation and the characteristics associated with the delay in the adoption of innovation. New econometric techniques including techniques for the analysis of qualitative dependent variables techniques that correct for sample selection bias and those for the analysis of longitudinal data have substantially benefited empirical research in this area. New methods that can correct for the biased estimate of the wages particular individuals would receive at 2 or more locations at the same point in time allow researchers to test locational decsion making models. Estimates of these structural models of labor migration support the hypothesis that individuals respond to income incentives in making the decsion to migrate. Further research is needed on the pazzling observation that migrant workers earn less than native-born workers with similar characteristics during the 1st few years after migration but more thereafter. Other topics that need further research include the macroeconomic effects of migration the microeconomic and macroeconomic relationships between aging and labor migration and the migration behavior of dual-earner families.

A comment on an article by Viem Kwok and Hayne Leland concerning the relationship between asymmetric information and the brain drain of skilled labor from developing countries is presented. A reply by Kwok and Leland (p. 535) is also included. (ANNOTATION)

A significant proportion of migration in low-income countries, particularly in rural areas, is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage. The authors seek to explain these mobility patterns based on a framework in which the marriage of daughters to locationally distant, dispersed yet kinship-related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks. Analyses of longitudinal data on consumption patterns, income, and marital arrangements in South Indian households lend support to the theory. Copyright 1989 by University of Chicago Press.