We study the effect of culture on important economic outcomes by using the 1970 Census to examine the work and fertility behaviour of women 30-40 years old, born in the US, but whose parents were born elsewhere. We use past female labour force participation and total fertility rates from the...

Three main vantage points are brought together in this paper: (1) Israel’s relatively good economic performance in recent years – at least, in comparison with other Western countries that have still not emerged from the recession; (2) motivations for the wave of social protests that erupted...

Several alterantive scenarios for the economic integration of East and West Germany are analysed. They all share an amphasis of the rile of migration and labor mobility in this process. The effects of congestion costs, rigid wages, human capital and heterogeneity of migrants, and endogenous...

This Paper addresses the question: why and where do immigrants cluster? We examine the relative importance and interaction of two alternative explanations of immigrant clustering: (1) network externalities and (2) herd behavior. We advance the theory by presenting a framework encompassing both...

This paper presents a critical survey of theories of migration, their welfare and policy implications and their empirical relevance. We also develop some extensions to the theory beginning with a general encompassing model of migration which treats the Harris and Todaro (HT) model as a special...

The willingness to migrate and locational choice may be influenced by others’ choices or plans, particularly if the ‘other people’, such as family and friends, are migrants, former migrants, or potential migrants themselves. We examine the roles ‘other people’ play in influencing an...

In Spring 1991, we argued that the centrepiece of German policy towards unification should be a universal, temporary wage subsidy in Eastern Germany and the elimination of all other subsidies. Subsequent events have strengthened the analytical case for and practical importance of this policy....

Standard economic reasoning based on competitive labour markets suggests that migrant inflow will unambiguously lead to allocative gains for the native population of a host country. Even abstracting from the costs of integration, however, this result is not robust when important labour market...

After unification, real wages in Eastern Germany rose rapidly relative to labour productivity despite high and rising levels of unemployment. This substantial increase in wage levels relative to those in Western Germany is difficult to explain without recourse to models of union behaviour or...

The European ageing process will lead to a dramatic rise in dependency ratios over the next decades. At the same time labour mobility will increase as a result of greater European economic integration. We analyse the implications of migration and ageing for European social security systems. With...