Upon arrival to a new country, many immigrants face job downgrading, a phenomenon describing workers being in jobs far below where they would be assigned based on their skills. Downgrading leads to immigrants receiving lower returns to the same skills than natives. The level of downgrading could...

Following one of the largest displacements in human history, almost eight million forced migrants arrived in West Germany after WWII. We study empirically how the settlement location of migrants affected their economic, social and political integration in West Germany. We first document large...

This paper examines the relationship between immigration and crime in a setting where large migration flows offer an opportunity to carefully appraise whether the populist view that immigrants cause crime is borne out by rigorous evidence. We consider possible crime effects from two large waves...

It is now well known that exogenous immigration shocks tend to have benign effects on native employment outcomes, thanks to various secondary adjustment processes made possible by flexible markets. One adjustment process that has received scant attention is that immigrants, as consumers of the...

International migration is maybe the single most effective way to alleviate poverty at a global level. When a given host country allows more immigrants in, this creates costs and benefits for that particular country as well as a positive externality for all those (individuals and governments)...

The flight and expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe during and after World War II constitutes one of the largest forced population movements in history. We analyze the economic integration of these forced migrants and their offspring in West Germany. The empirical results suggest that even a...

Immigrants can increase international trade by shifting preferences towards the goods of their country of origin and by reducing bilateral transaction costs. Using geographical variations across US states for the period 1970 to 2005, we quantify the impact of immigrants on intermediate goods...

We build a model of conflict in which two groups contest a resource and must decide on the optimal allocation of labor between fighting and productive activities. In this setting, a diaspora emanating from one of the two groups can get actively involved in the conflict by transferring financial...

We study the impact of asylum waiting, exploiting a rapid increase in processing times for asylum seekers to Sweden. Longer waiting slows down integration. Accumulated earnings during the first four years after application are 2.3 percent lower per added month of waiting. The impact is due to...