We bring to bear a novel dataset covering the employment history of about 450 million individuals from 180 countries to study return migration and the impact of skilled international migration on human capital stocks across countries. Return migration is a common phenomenon, with 38% of skilled...

In this article we revive, extend and improve the approach used in a series of influential papers written in the 2000s to estimate how changes in the supply of immigrant workers affected natives' wages in the US. We begin by extending the analysis to include the more recent years 2000-2022....

Argentina was the second largest destination country during the Age of Mass Migration, receiving nearly six million migrants. In this article, we first summarize recent findings characterizing migrants' long-term economic assimilation and their contributions to local economic development. The...

Are developing-world cities engines of opportunities for low-wage earners? In this study, we track a cohort of young low-income workers in Brazil for thirteen years to explore the contribution of factors such as industrial structure and skill segregation on upward income mobility. We find that...

The effects of immigration are reasonably well understood in developed countries, but they are far more poorly understood in developing ones despite the importance of these countries as immigrant destinations. We address this shortcoming by studying the effects of immigration to Brazil during...

In this paper we revisit the relationship between democracy, redistribution and inequality. We first explain the theoretical reasons why democracy is expected to increase redistribution and reduce inequality, and why this expectation may fail to be realized when democracy is captured by the...

In Latin America--the world's most unequal region--non-white rural populations disproportionately suffer from Chagas disease, a neglected tropical disease (NTD) that causes weeks of acute symptoms and can lead to chronic heart problems decades later. We demonstrate that Brazil's post-1983...

Immigrants contribute disproportionately to entrepreneurship in many countries, accounting for a quarter of new employer businesses in the US. We review recent research on the measurement of immigrant entrepreneurship, the traits of immigrant founders, their economic impact, and policy levers....

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...