This paper considers a setting in which the acquisition of human capital entails a change of location in social space that causes individuals to revise their comparison groups. Skill levels are viewed as occupational groups, and moving up the skill ladder by acquiring additional human capital,...

This paper develops a one sector, two-input model with endogenous human capital formation. The two inputs are two types of skilled labor: engineering, which exerts a positive externality on total factor productivity, and law, which does not. The paper shows that a marginal prospect of migration...

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, by the...

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...

In this paper we study the impact of the international migration of unskilled workers on skill formation and the average skill level in the home country. We analyze what appears to be the least threatening scenario from the point of view of its effect on the supply of skills at home: namely,...