Limited Mobility Bias explains why positive assortative matching is not observed in the empirical literature. Using German social security records, we estimate the correlation between worker and firm contributions to wage equations and find that it is unambiguously positive.

The net welfare benefit of the ‘brain drain’ of skilled workers depends on their propensity to return to their home countries. Yet, relatively little is known empirically about the return migration decisions of skilled workers. Here, I study a sample of 1460 foreign faculty in...

Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.

The long run effect of migration solely by unskilled workers is that skilled workers in the home country acquire additional human capital yet their share in the country’s workforce falls. Consequently, the country’s average level of human capital is lowered.

This paper examines the issue of skilled–unskilled wage inequality in the shortrun when varieties of producer services are traded. It is shown that, irrespective of the relative size of income share of capital, inflow of neither skilled nor unskilled labour affects skilled–unskilled wage...

Strong ties with the home country and with the host country can coexist. An altruistic migrant who sends remittances to his family back home assimilates more the more altruistic he is, and also more than a non-remitting migrant.

It is conventionally believed that immigration increases crime rates in the host country. However, empirical results are not in line with this crime concern. We develop a model with endogenous skill upgrading and criminal choices to reconcile the inconsistency.

Return migration is the positive counterpart of the brain drain. The effects of the brain drain in Italy could be negative: this paper shows that highly skilled migrants decide not to return to their native country.

We estimate a behavioural model of household’s remittances to investigate to what extent the level of financial development in the home country affects decisions on whether and how much to remit.

This paper studies in- and out-migration from the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century and assesses how these flows affected state-level labor markets. It shows that out-migration positively impacted the earnings growth of remaining workers, while in-migration had a negative...