There are concerns about the attachment of immigrants to the labor force, and the potential policy responses. This paper uses a bi-national survey on immigrant performance to investigate the sorting of individuals into full-time paid-employment and entrepreneurship and their economic success....

This paper studies the effect of top tax rates on inventors' mobility since 1977. We put special emphasis on "superstar" inventors, those with the most and most valuable patents. We use panel data on inventors from the United States and European Patent Offices to track inventors' locations over...

This Paper addresses the question: why and where do immigrants cluster? We examine the relative importance and interaction of two alternative explanations of immigrant clustering: (1) network externalities and (2) herd behavior. We advance the theory by presenting a framework encompassing both...

While global migration is increasing, internal EU migration flows have remained low. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the determinants and scale of European migration. It surveys previous historical experiences and empirical findings including the recent Eastern enlargements....

Governments have rarely been successful in adhering to intended consequences of temporary guest-worker policies. The conduit for legal entry of workers has resulted in a population of illegal workers, as the initially legal workers make the move to illegal employment. In this paper we examine...

Recent studies have shown that there are significant earnings differentials between immigrants and natives in Switzerland. The goal of this paper is to determine whether these differences can be attributed to diverging socio-economic endowments or to discrimination. We use the well-known...

This paper presents a critical survey of theories of migration, their welfare and policy implications and their empirical relevance. We also develop some extensions to the theory beginning with a general encompassing model of migration which treats the Harris and Todaro (HT) model as a special...

The willingness to migrate and locational choice may be influenced by others’ choices or plans, particularly if the ‘other people’, such as family and friends, are migrants, former migrants, or potential migrants themselves. We examine the roles ‘other people’ play in influencing an...

The design of optimal immigration policy, particularly in the face of the spiraling demand for highly skilled workers, such as IT workers and engineers, is a topical issue in the policy debate as well as the economic literature. In this paper, we present empirical evidence from firm-level data...