The design of optimal immigration policy, particularly in the face of the spiralling demand for highly skilled workers, such as IT workers and engineers, is a topical issue in the policy debate as well as the economic literature. In this paper, we present empirical evidence from firm level data...

We study the labor market impact of opening borders to low wage countries. The analysis exploits time and regional variation provided by the 2004 EU enlargement in combination with transport links to Sweden from the new member states. The results suggest an adverse impact on earnings of present...

Theoretical arguments and previous country-level evidence indicate that immigrants are more fluid than natives in responding to changing labor shortages across countries, skill-groups or industries. The diversity across EU member states enables us to test this hypothesis across various...

The H-1B program allows firms in the United States to temporarily hire high-skilled foreign citizens. H-1B workers are highly concentrated among a small number of firms. We develop a theoretical model demonstrating that this phenomenon is an artifact of policy design: When the government...

The 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union were unprecedented in a number of economic and policy aspects. This essay provides a broad and in-depth account of the effects of the post-enlargement migration flows on the receiving as well as sending countries in three broader areas: labour...

This paper studies the migration response of the youth from new EU member states to disparate conditions in an enlarged European Union at the onset of the Great Recession. We use the Eurobarometer data and probabilistic econometric models to identify the key drivers of the intention to work in...

This paper studies the costs and benefits of the adoption of the policy of free movement for workers. For the countries to agree on uncontrolled movement of workers, the short run costs must be outweighed by the long term benefits that result from better labor market flexibility and income...

The eastern enlargements of the European Union (EU) and the extension of the free movement of workers to the new member states' citizens unleashed significant east-west migration flows in a labor market with more than half a billion people. Although many old member states applied transitional...

Intensified European integration, enlargement of the EU, and increasing migration activity worldwide have pushed migration and migration policy to the forefront of the European agenda. This paper identifies the salient questions to be addressed by any educated migration policy. It embeds this...

This paper estimates the causal effect of the prospect of legal status on the employment outcomes of undocumented immigrants. Our identification strategy exploits a natural experiment provided by the 2002 amnesty program in Italy that introduced an exogenous discontinuity in eligibility based on...