This paper presents a first attempt at understanding some of the many issues involved in the granting of an amnesty to illegal immigrants. We consider government behavior with respect to allocations on limiting infiltration (border control) and apprehending infiltrators (internal control) and,...

This paper analyses capital export controls under majority voting. It is shown that individuals vote according to their factor endowment ratio. An individual’s optimal restriction is tighter, the lower their capital-labour ratio and the larger the country; it is also tighter if unemployment...

Illegal immigration has been the focus of much debate in receiving countries, but little is known about what drives individual attitudes towards illegal immigrants. To study this question, we use the CCES survey, which was carried out in 2006 in the United States. We find evidence that - in...

Despite restrictive migration policies, large numbers of undocumented migrants reside in many destination countries. If official migration targets are not enforced, why are they devised? To address this puzzle, we develop a political agency model with uncertainty on the migrants' supply, where...

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...

A number of studies have established a positive effect of migrants' language proficiency on their productivity. It has been argued that these estimates are upward-biased because of the presence of unobserved heterogeneity. To obtain an accurate estimate of language effects is important since it...

While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly...

We investigate the origin and evolution of the legal institution of citizenship from a political economy perspective. We compile a new data set on citizenship laws across countries of the world which documents how these institutions have evolved in the postwar period. We show that, despite a...

By means of a descriptive survey of theoretical literature we first work out the potential determinants that may drive international migration from developing to developed countries. In addition, we look at the relationship between trade, development and migration. Empirical studies focusing on...

This paper analyses labour market behaviour of married migrant women. The theoretical analysis shows that migrants who intend to remain only temporarily in the host country are likely to exhibit a different labour market behaviour than migrants who wish to stay permanently. The reason is that...