Legal and illegal markets often coexist. In theory, marginal legalization can either substitute for the remaining parallel market, or complement it via scale effects. I study migrants crossing without prior authorization at the US southwest border, where large-scale unlawful crossing coexists...

Do immigrants make goods from their origin country more accessible to their non-immigrant neighbors? We augment U.S. grocery scanner data to include the origin country of both households and products, thereby enabling the first direct estimate of how local immigrant presence affects import...

Analyzing law enforcement data on corruption incidents for a panel of 79 Russian regions for the period 2004-2007, we find that the relative salaries of bureaucrats determine corruption levels: Corruption declines as relative salaries rise up to a turning point, beyond which corruption rises...

This paper investigates the causal relationship between corruption and fixed capital investment in Russian regions. The panel data on corruption allow to control for unobserved heterogeneity with fixed effects estimation. We address the problem of endogeneity by introducing novel instrumental...

Can providing information to potential migrants influence their decisions about risky and irregular migration? We conduct an experiment with over 7,000 secondary school students in Guinea, providing information through video testimonials by migrants who settled in Europe and through aggregate...

One of the outcomes of the Brexit referendum result was that EU nationals were required to register on the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) if they wanted to remain in the UK after its departure from the EU. In order to be granted settled or pre-settled status, applications needed to have been...

While Western countries worry about labor shortages, their institutional barriers to skill transferability prevent immigrants from fully utilizing foreign qualifications. Combining administrative and survey data in a difference-in-differences design, we show that a German reform, which lifted...

We study the effect of terrorist attacks on the migration discourse in the European Parliament (EP). First, using an LLM model, we develop an original dataset on sentiments of all parliamentary speeches concerning migration for 2009-2019, building on a novel dataset by Sylvester et al. (2023)....