Considering the contribution of labor migration to the reemployment of the unemployed and the fact that there is a paucity of studies on this in existing literature, this research studies the connections between the primary, return, and onward migrations and the reemployment of unemployed labor in Taiwan. The distinction among these three types of migration is essential for avoiding ambiguous and misleading empirical findings. A motivation for this research is the desire to obtain insights into the apparent contradiction between the relatively high geographical mobility of the unemployed and the persistence of a high unemployment rate in Taiwan since the mid-1990s. Based on the 1991-2006 ”Quasi-Longitudinal Manpower Utilization Survey”, the research goals are threefold: (1) to assess the effectiveness of the ”disappointment hypothesis”, ”chronicity hypothesis”, and ”responsiveness hypothesis” in explaining repeat (i.e. onward and return) migration behaviors of the unemployed; (2) to ascertain the relationship between migration of the unemployed and reemployment; (3) to distinguish the relative effectiveness of primary, onward, and return migrations in promoting reemployment of the unemployed. Major research findings are as follows: (1) the three hypotheses all gain partial support, and none could exclusively explain the repeat migration behaviors of the unemployed; (2) past migration experiences, individual characteristics (gender, age, education, etc.), business cycle, availability of labor market information, and ties to and strength of kinship-friendship networks are crucial in explaining the migration behaviors of the unemployed; (3) a change in labor force status tends to trigger labor migration, and relative to the employed workforce, the unemployed are more prone to choose return migration than onward migration; (4) once the decision of repeat migration has been made, the unemployed who eventually get reemployed are more likely to engage in onward migration than the unemployed who do not successfully acquire a new job; (5) although the business cycle exhibits the expected negative effect on return migration for the unemployed, the positive association between the business cycle and migration of the unemployed is mainly shaped by its effect on primary and onward migrations amongst the unemployed; (6) in contrast to its primary and onward counterparts, return migration of the unemployed is selective of those with less human capital and lower in the occupational hierarchy.

The tempo effect was first discussed and applied to fertility studies, before being extended to other fields such as marriage and mortality. The tempo effect means that the period quantum and tempo of conventional life tables are impacted by tempo, which results in bias (Bongaarts and Feeney 2006). Therefore, the goal of recent studies has been to adjust this tempo distortion, which results from a rise or fall in the mean age at which an event occurs, and to estimate the actual period measure of longevity. In general, the fertility tempo effect is widely accepted, but the mortality tempo effect remains controversial. Studies of the tempo effect on fertility and first marriage have been examined thoroughly in Taiwan. For this reason, our research focuses on the mortality tempo effect, and explores unadjusted and adjusted life expectancies in Taiwan. Our results show first, that the observed adult mortality rate fits the logistic model better than the Gompertz model, as in other countries with high life expectancy. On the other hand, tempo adjusted life expectancy measures current conditions, as does fertility. Second, when the tempo effect on mortality is excluded (thus the value of average life span is increased), the conventional life expectancy has a positive bias, with women having a higher life expectancy than men, and the average tempo effect is 2.3 and 2.1 years respectively. Finally, the tempo effect on women in Taiwan is higher than that in Sweden, the U.S., Germany, Denmark, England and Wales. The reason might be that mortality in Taiwan has decreased more sharply than other countries, causing the tempo effect to be higher. We conclude that the adjusted life expectancy is more accurate than the unadjusted one.

The well-known economic independence hypothesis accounting for marital dissolution has been challenged in Western countries for the past two decades. However, existing studies in Taiwan claim that women's labor force participation destabilizes marriage. This study re-examines the question by taking advantage of marriage and work history information from Taiwan's Panel Study of Family Dynamics (PSFD) and event history analysis. While taking into consideration the amount of women's labor force participation, we found that the results do not fully support the economic independence hypothesis. Not only do wives who work most of the time during marriage have a higher divorce risk (compared with those who work one to three fourths of the length of marriage), but stay-home wives are significantly more likely to divorce, too. It is possible that women's lack of bargaining power due to a low level of labor market involvement has a negative impact on marriage stability.

Migration is the common trajectory for most of the indigenous in Taiwan, but the social situations they encounter are totally different between the urban indigenous and those who stay in traditional areas. Instead of concentrating on the social problems urban indigenous might encounter, this paper focuses on the effect of social distance that migrants might experience and whether they can overcome the so-called ethnic boundaries. The research uses the data of the Taiwan Indigenous People Survey (TIPS) both to reveal those aspects of space distribution, employment status and social distance among urban indigenous and to elaborate the difference between the first and second migrant generations. The main findings are as follows: (1) the second migrant generation are much younger, better educated and have a higher probability of ethnic intermarriage and better job opportunities than the first generation; (2) the social contact with other ethnic groups has a positive effect on decreasing social distance between the indigenous and Han people; moreover the effect is more significant among the first generation than the second one; (3) the second generation is more likely to cross the social boundary than the first one; (4) for both generations, the effects of social contact and social distance on predicting the probability of ethnic intermarriage are both significant.

No abstract available.