We present supportive empirical evidence and a new theoretical explanation for the negative selection into planned return migration between similar regions in Germany. In our model costly temporary and permanent migration are used as imperfect signals to indicate workers’ high but otherwise...

This study investigates whether migrants, once they have decided to move to Switzerland, prefer to settle in municipalities that feature low income taxes. In line with the existing literature, results from cluster-specific count data models indicate that income taxes are a significant pull...

A recent Spanish tax reform granted regions the authority to set income tax rates, resulting in substantial tax differentials. We use individual-level information from Social Security records over a period of one decade. Conditional on moving, taxes have a significant effect on location choice....

This paper investigates how the size of co-ethnic networks at the time of arrival affect the economic success of immigrants in Germany. Applying panel analysis with a large set of fixed effects and controls, we isolate the association between initial network size and long-run immigrant outcomes....

Does a high regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children’s acquisition of host-country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the exogenous placement of guest workers from five ethnicities across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s...

Do electoral incentives affect immigration policies? I study this question in the setting of Italian municipalities making decisions about the reception of refugees. The localized control of the reception policy (SPRAR), combined with the exogenous timing of policy decisions and staggered...

Recent European legislation on immigration has revealed a particular paradox on migration policies. On the one hand, the trend of recent legislation points to the increasing closure of frontiers (OECD 1999, 2001,2004), trying to limit the immigrants' stock. On the other hand, there is an...

We investigate whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are...

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the past four decades of empirical research on the relationship between internal migration and regional variation in the generosity of Canada's unemployment insurance system. It has long been argued that because the Canadian insurance system is...

In a number of papers A.J. Oswald (1996, 1997) argues that high rates of home ownership may imply inferior labour market outcomes. This paper tests the Oswald hypothesis in a panel of 42 Belgian districts since the 1970s. The use of data going back to 1970 allows us to embed the Oswald...