For nearly four decades now, the conventional wisdom has been that the migration of human capital (skilled workers) from a developing country to a developed country is detrimental to the developing country. However, this perception need not hold. A well designed migration policy can result in a...

Quite often, migrants appear to exert little effort to absorb the mainstream culture and to learn the language of their host society, even though the economic returns (increased productivity and enhanced earnings) to assimilation are high. We show that when interpersonal comparisons affect...

A theory is developed of labor migration that is prompted by a desire to avoid "social humiliation." In a general equilibrium framework it is shown that as long as migration can reduce humiliation sufficiently, migration will occur even between two identical economies. Migration increases the...

This paper develops a model of voluntary migration into degrading work. The essence of the model is a tension between two “bads:” that which arises from being relatively deprived at home, and that which arises from engaging in humiliating work away from home. Balancing between these two...

In this paper we define the relative deprivation of a person with income y as an increasing function of the percentage of individuals in the person's reference group whose income is larger than y. We obtain his satisfaction by adding up the marginal utilities of income over the range of income a...

Although the economic performance of migrants in the receiving country undoubtedly depends on qualifications, it is also affected by inclinations. Given the probability of return migration, a behavioural link is established between the incentive of migrants to save in their country of...

The asylum seekers who choose the level of investment in the host-country-specific human capital, and the government of the host country that chooses the probability of naturalization are modeled as optimizing economic agents in a setting not of their choosing.