The intratemporal redistribution feature of the welfare state makes it an attractive destination for immigrants, particularly for low-skill immigrants. George Borjas (1994) reports that foreign-born households in the United States accounted for 10 percent of households receiving public...

Migration of young workers (as distinct from retirees), even when driven in by the generosity of the welfare state, slows down the trend of increasing dependency ratio. But, even though low-skill migration improves the dependency ratio, it nevertheless burdens the welfare state. Recent studies...

It is often argued that tax competition may lead to a 'race to the bottom'. This result may indeed hold in the case of factor mobility (such as capital). However, in this paper we emphasize the unique feature of labor migration, that may nullify the 'race to the bottom' hypothesis. Labor...

The extent of taxation and redistribution Policy is generally determined as a political-economy equilibrium by a balance between those who gain from higher taxes/transfers and those who lose. In a stylized model of migration and human capital formation, we show - somewhat against the...

We model an overlapping-generations economy with two skill levels: skilled and unskilled. The welfare-state is modeled simply by a proportional tax on labor income to finance a demogrant in a balanced-budget manner. Therefore, some (the unskilled workers and old retirees) are net beneficiaries...

The paper explains most, if not all, observations made by the empirical literature regarding the behavior of skilled and unskilled real wages in the United States, especially those since 1980. Generalizing the Stopler-Samuelson theorem, the authors show that the nontraded sector is critical to...