Due to ageing population and low birth rates, the European Union (EU) will need to import foreign labour in the next decades. In this context, the EU neighbouring countries (ENC) are the main countries of origin and transit of legal and illegal migration towards Europe. Their economic, cultural...

We investigate whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are...

Ever since Sjaastad (1962), researchers have struggled to quantify the psychic costs of migration. We monetize psychic cost as the wage premium for moving to a culturally different location. We combine administrative social security panel data with a proxy for cultural difference based on...

The paper compares the pattern of wage assimilation of foreigners with both native immigrants and local natives in Italy, a country with large internal and international migration. This comparison, not yet exploited, yields understanding of the role played by language and knowledge of social...

In this paper we model the migration decisions of high-skilled women as a function of the benefits associated with moving from an origin with relatively low women's rights to a destination with a relatively high level of women's rights. However, the costs faced by women are decreasing in the...

This paper uses a unique survey of the Chinese youth to construct a panel data in which we keep track of geographical and job mobilities. Our estimation results deliver the following major findings. (1) The sample individuals are highly mobile. Job quits and relocations are frequent and they are...

This study aims at analyzing the differences in the factors that influence the probability of knowledge transfer within industry and from industry to science in the biotechnology sector. In order to model these knowledge flows a citation analysis on the basis of patent data was conducted and a...