About 1.4 million refugees and irregular migrants arrived in Europe in 2015 and 2016. We model how refugees and irregular migrants are self-selected. Using unique datasets from the International Organization for Migration and Gallup World Polls, we provide the first large-scale evidence on...

This paper presents evidence for structural differences in economic growth dynamics between the current EU and the central- and eastern European accession countries. Two important results emerge from the analysis. First, accession countries have posted higher average growth and wider output...

We quantify the degree of persistence in unemployment rates of transition countries using a variety of methods benchmarked against the EU. In part of the paper, we work with the concept of linear u0093Hysteresisu0094 as described by the presence of unit roots in unemployment. Since this is...

Workers' remittances have become the second largest source of net financial flows to developing countries. However, the main motives for sending remittances remain controversial. This paper examines the importance of altruistic versus investment motives using a new panel data set of bilateral...

The former EU president Jean-Claude Junker has proposed that all countries of the European Union should also adopt the euro as their currency and recent research has shown that countries currently pursuing this goal indeed fulfill the classical Optimal Currency Area (OCA) criterion of positively...