Illegal migrants supply a valuable productive input: effort. But their status as illegals means that these migrants face a strictly positive probability of expulsion. A return to their country of origin entails reduced earnings when the wage at origin is lower than the wage at destination. This...

This paper provides a novel explanation of “educated unemployment,” which is a salient feature of the labor markets in a number of developing countries. In a simple job-search framework we show that “educated unemployment” is caused by the perspective of international migration, that is,...

Quite often, migrants appear to exert little effort to absorb the mainstream culture and to learn the language of their host society, even though the economic returns (increased productivity and enhanced earnings) to assimilation are high. We show that when interpersonal comparisons affect...

A framework that yields different possible patterns of migration as optimal solutions to a simple utility maximization problem is presented and explored. It is shown that seasonal migration arises as an optimal endogenous response to a comparison of costs (of living and of separation) and...

At least to some extent migration behavior is the outcome of a preference for migration. The pattern of migration as an outcome of a preference for migration depends on two key factors: imitation technology and migration feasibility. We show that these factors jointly determine the outcome of a...

A new general-equilibrium model that links together rural-to-urban migration, the externality effect of the average level of human capital, and agglomeration economies shows that in developing countries, unrestricted rural-to-urban migration reduces the average income of both rural and urban...

This chapter investigates the impact of the imposition of sanctions for employing illegal migrants on the welfare of native laborers. In response to such sanctions, managers in a firm may be reassigned from the supervision of production to the verification of the legality of the firm’s labor...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen’s 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from social-psychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

Drawing on two assumptions: that menopause is an instrument for the efficient regulation of the duration of a biologically expensive state, and that people have children in order to obtain support from them in old age, we set out a new idea that seeks to explain both the occurrence of menopause...

There is a presumption that when an individual’s comparison of his income with the incomes of others in his comparison group yields an unfavorable outcome, the individual is dismayed and experiences stress that impinges negatively on his health. In a recent study, Hounkpatin et al. (2016)...