International migration with heterogeneous agents : theory and evidence

"Two puzzling facts of international migration are that only a small share of a sending country's population emigrates and that net migration rates tend to cease over time. This paper addresses these issues in a migration model with heterogeneous agents that features temporary migration. In equilibrium a positive relation exists between the stock of migrants and the income differential, while the net migration flow becomes zero. Consequently, empirical migration models, estimating net migration flows instead of stocks, may be misspecified. This suspicion appears to be confirmed by our empirical investigation of cointegration relationships of flow and stock migration models." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))