We develop a theoretical model of human skill formation and emigration. Additionally to existing brain drain models, we partly endogenize the heterogeneity of the individuals, by introducing aspirations. Emigration of an individual will result in a migration experience, which increases the...

The flight and expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe during and after World War II constitutes one of the largest forced population movements in history. We analyze the economic integration of these forced migrants and their offspring in West Germany. The empirical results suggest that even a...

A key problem in the literature on the economics of migration is how emigration of an individual affects households left behind. Answers to this question must confront a problem I refer to as invisible sample selection: when entire households migrate, no information about them remains in their...

This paper identifies the determinants and patterns of mass migration in Moldova – a country in which migration has become the dominant socioeconomic phenomenon in a period of less than 8 years. Special emphasis is placed on seasonal migration, which has become increasingly popular in many...

This paper employs a wage-setting approach to analyze the labor market effects of immigration into Germany. The wage-setting framework relies on the assumption that wages tend to decline with the unemployment rate, albeit imperfectly. This enables us to consider labor market rigidities, which...

This paper employs the Ordinary Least Squares, Instrumental Variables and Treatment Effect models to a new dataset from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) to estimate return to the four-year university education in 2008. Our estimates reveal that the return to university...

This paper revisits Political Budget Cycles (PBCs) in the enlarged European Union (EU). Based on a panel of 25 current EU member states from 1996 to 2012, we show that governments frequently fiscally stimulate the economy prior to elections; a phenomenon that is seemingly not only an ‘Eastern...

This paper uses a Markov regime-switching model to assess the vulnerability of a series of Central and Eastern European countries (i.e. Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic) and two CIS countries (i.e., Russia and Ukraine) during the period 1993–2004. For the new EU member states in...

International migration not only enables individuals to earn higher wages but also exposes them to new environments. The norms and values experienced at the destination country could change the behavior of the migrant but also of family members left behind. In this paper we argue that a brain...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...