We aim to quantify the role of social networks in job-related migration. With over 130 million rural labors migrating to the city each year, China is experiencing the largest internal migration in the human history. Using instrumental variables in the 2006 China Agricultural Census, we find that...

Though the geographic, occupational, and financial mobility of average Americans were important aspects of nineteenth century U.S. economic development, the extent and correlates of this economic mobility have remained open to debate in the absence of individual- level longitudinal data. This...

This paper presents a general equilibrium approach to calculating labour adjustment costs induced by trade policy changes or external sector shocks, which we illustrate by analyzing the adjustment consequences of eliminating quotas and tariffs on U.S. imports. In our approach, factor adjustments...

In 1997 GDP per capita in East Germany was 57% of that of West Germany, wage rates were 75% of western levels, and the unemployment rate was at least double the western rate of 7.8%. One would expect that if capital flows and trade in goods failed to bring convergence, labor flows would respond,...

Between 1940 and 1970, more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States, during the Second Great Migration. This same period witnessed the struggle and eventual success of the civil rights movement in ending institutionalized racial discrimination....

Migration is a key mechanism through which local labor markets adjust to economic shocks. In this paper, we analyze the migration response of American workers to two of the most important shocks that hit US manufacturing since the 1990s: Chinese import competition and the introduction of...

We examine how export expansion induced by the U.S-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) affected migration, school enrollment, work and healthcare use of young children and adolescents in Vietnam. To do so, we exploit variation in tariff reductions across industries associated with the BTA...

This paper provides a novel perspective on the Great Migration out of the U.S. South. Using a shift-share identification strategy, we show how millions of Southern white migrants transformed the cultural and political landscape across America. Counties with a larger Southern white share by 1940...

This paper seeks to determine the approximate number of homeless persons in the U.S., the rate of change in the number, and whether or not the problem is likely to be permanent or transitory. It makes particular use of a new 1985 survey of over 503 homeless people in New York City. It finds: (1)...