The paper reviews recent literature on the economics of migration and diasporas, focusing on economic gains and opportunities that these diasporas could represent for home countries. In addition, the paper discusses policies aimed at leveraging this "diaspora capital".

This article studies the impact of immigration restriction policies on technology adoption in sending countries. From 1920 to 1921, the number of Italian immigrants to the United States dropped by 85% after Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, a severely restrictive immigration law. In a...

We re-examine the effects of negative weather anomalies during the growing season on the decision to migrate in rural households in five sub-Saharan African countries. To this end we combine a multi-country household panel dataset with high-resolution gridded precipitation data. We find that...

Exploiting the age-at-enrollment policies in 16 German states as exogenous source of variation, I examine whether the schooling of the oldest child in a migrant household affects parents’ integration. My analysis links administrative records on primary school enrollment cutoff dates with micro...

Immigration may impact income distribution both by affecting the skill composition of a country's residents, and, by changing relative factor supplies, its relative factor prices. We provide some background evidence on compositional factors but focus primarily on factor prices. We first consider...

Traditional theories of integration such as the optimum currency area approach attribute a prominent role to international labour mobility in coping with relative economic fluctuations between countries. However, recent studies on international migration have overlooked the role of short-run...

We present a theory on migration of dual-earner couples, and test it in the context of international migration. Our model predicts that the probability that a couple emigrates increases in the earnings of the primary earner. The effect of the earnings of the secondary earner may go either way....

An important issue in public policy debates is the effect of international migration on welfare in source and host countries. We address this issue by constructing a general equilibrium model of a two-class source or host country. Each country produces many traded and non-traded goods, uses...

The Middle East was once seen as a medieval great globalized force. Nowadays it shows one of the lowest intra-regional trade in the world and therefore it is claimed that the region is poorly integrated. Yet, with the steady .ow of workers across national borders of the Middle East is this...

This paper looks at the effect of the relatedness of two countries, measured by their genetic distance, on educational migrant selection. We analyze bilateral country-level education-specific migration stocks from 85 sending countries to the 15 main destination countries in 2000 and show that...