The analysis of how the economic crisis in Europe has reshaped migration flows faces two challenges: (i) the confounding influence of correlated changes in the attractiveness of alternative destinations, and (ii) the role of rapidly changing expectations about the evolution of the economic...

This paper examines the determinants of gross labour flows in a context where modeling the migration decision as a wage-maximizing process may be inadequate due to regional wage rigidities that result from central wage bargaining. In such a context, the framework that has been developed by...

This paper investigates immigrants and natives labour supply to the firm within a semi-structural approach based on a dynamic monopsony framework. Applying duration models to a large administrative employer employee data set for Germany, we find that once accounting for unobserved worker...

It is difficult to estimate the impact of geographic clustering on productivity because of endogeneity issues. I use birthplace-cluster distance as an instrumental variable for the incidence of clustering of prominent classical composers born between 1750 and 1899. I find that geographic...

This paper uses panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to analyze welfare entry and exit among natives and immigrants after a substantial reform of the welfare system (``Hartz reform''). Using results from dynamic multinomial logit models, we calculate transition matrices between...

This paper analyzes wage assimilation of ethnic German immigrants to Germany. We use unique administrative data that include a standardized measure of immigrants' pre-migration wage based on occupation, industry, tenure, qualification, and the German wage structure. We find that immigrants...

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 specific factors model, in which...

We estimate the causal effect of immigration on unemployment, employment and wages of resident employees in Switzerland, whose foreign labor force has increased by 32.8% in the last ten years. To address endogeneity of immigration into different labor market cells, we develop new variants of the...

We study state dependence in the German welfare system and compare transition patterns before and after recent reforms of the welfare system (Hartz Reforms). Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we apply dynamic multinomial logit estimators and find that welfare transitions have...

We investigate the role of complementarities in production and skill mobility across cities. We propose a general equilibrium model of location choice by heterogeneously skilled workers, and consider different degrees of complementarities between the skills of workers. The nature of the...