Why do low-skilled workers choose to work in a foreign economy and what determines their wages? The Paper empirically implements the Roy self-selection model to study this question. It does so using a unique dataset on Palestinian workers working locally and in the Israeli economy. The data...

Since the 1970s Britain has gone from being a country of net emigration to one of net immigration, with a trend increase in immigration of more than 100,000 per year. This Paper represents the first attempt to model the variations in net migration for British and for foreign citizens, across...

Labour markets in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) will be a key vehicle for the expression and reallocation of skills and talents in the transformation process. To a large extent, the emergence of unemployment is an indicator of this restructuring and reallocation. This paper surveys some of...

This paper explores the two common concepts of the natural rate of unemployment: (i) the stable, long-run equilibrium rate of unemployment; and (ii) the equilibrium unemployment rate at which there is no tendency for this rate to change, given the exogenous variables. The first concept (common...

The recent media and political attention on service outsourcing from developed to developing countries gives the impression that outsourcing is exploding. As a result, workers in industrial countries are anxious about job losses. This Paper aims to establish what are the hypes and what are the...

Convergence in per capita income turns on whether technological knowledge spillovers are global or local. Global spillovers favour convergence, while a geographically limited scope of knowledge diffusion can lead to regional clusters of countries with persistently different levels of income per...

This Paper constructs a general equilibrium trade model of a small open economy producing an exported good, an imported good and a non-traded good by using two or more factors of production, one of which, namely capital, is imperfectly internationally mobile. Within this framework, it is shown...

Merchanting is goods trade that does not cross the border of the firm's country of residence. Merchanting grew strongly in the last decade in several European economies and has become an important determinant of these countries' current account. Because merchanting firms reinvest their earnings...

The paper is devoted to an econometric analysis of learning foreign languages in all parts of the world. Our sample covers 193 countries and 13 important languages. Four factors significantly explain learning, two of which affect the broad decision to learn, while two concern as well the choice...

The aim of the Paper is to see whether individuals’ attitudes towards globalization are consistent with the predictions of Heckscher-Ohlin theory. The theory predicts that the impact of being skilled or unskilled on attitudes towards trade and immigration should depend on a country’s skill...