The paper examines whether international regulatory harmonization increases cross-border labor migration. To study this question, we analyze European Union (EU) initiatives that harmonized accounting and auditing standards. Regulatory harmonization should reduce economic mobility barriers,...

In this note, we show that labour market integration can be a double-edged sword. In the presence of local human capital externalities, integration and the ensuing agglomeration of skilled labour can cause a decline in human capital and the total wage sum (net of education costs). In particular,...

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...

This work focuses on a temporary guest-worker-type migration of individuals from the middle class of the wealth distribution. The article demonstrates that the possibility of a low-skilled guest-worker employment in a higher wage foreign country lowers the relative attractiveness of the skilled...

The assumption that all migrations are permanent, which pervaded the early microdata-based research on immigrant career profiles, is not supported by the empirical evidence. Rather, many – if not most – migrations appear to be temporary. In this paper, therefore, we illustrate the estimation...

We argue that the narrative of variety-induced gains from trade in differentiated goods needs revision. If producing differentiated varieties of a good requires differentiated skills and if the work force is heterogeneous in these skills, then firms are likely to have monopsony power. We show...

With endogenous skills and given technology, labor market integration necessarily lowers welfare of the left-behind in a poor sending country, even if all agents face identical emigration probabilities. This is in sharp contrast to the case of exogenous skill supply

Germany exhibits a strong reduction in domestic manufacturing production depth (bazaar effect). I argue that this reflects an unbundling of comparative advantage. Using a model where Ricardian plus Heckscher-Ohlin-type comparative advantage relates to fragments of production, I compare a trading...

We study the interaction between the optimal immigration policy of a host country and education policy of a source country in a model of international migration of skilled workers. Acquisition of human capital is driven by the academic and career opportunities at home and abroad. Greater...

This paper investigates the welfare consequences of immigration policies in a model with two types of labour, skilled and unskilled, and international capital mobility. The paper examines the effect of government policies - which change the immigration cost and causes immigration of one type of...