Countries across Eastern Europe and Central Asia are in their third decade of independence. What impact does this have on the skills premium and does accession to the European Union have an impact on the returns to education? The returns to education in 28 transition and 20 non-transition...

We investigate whether and how economic integration increases state capacity. This important relationship has not been studied in detail so far. We put together a conceptual framework to guide our analysis that highlights what we call the Montesquieu, Weber and Smith channels. Each of these...

For decades, countries aspiring to join the European Union (EU) have been linked to it through migration. Yet little is known about how migration affects individual support for joining the EU in prospective member states. We explore the relationship between migration and support for EU accession...

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...

UK population growth over the last thirty-five years has been remarkably low in comparison with other countries; the population grew by just 7% between 1971 and 2004, less than all the other EU15 countries except Germany. The UK population has grown at a faster pace since the turn of the...

One of the strongest stylized facts of the transition is also one of the most unexpected: after 1989 Central and Eastern European and Former Soviet Union countries diverged massively. Institutions are a main reason. The EU anchor thesis posits that the prospect of membership in the European...

We study how the EU enlargement in 2004 and the Great Recession in the late 2000s have shaped the scale and composition of migration flows from the New Member States to Germany. We demonstrate that immigration increased substantially despite the restrictions on the German labor market, and that...

This paper examines UK migration policy and recent migration flows from Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries to the UK. Although inflows of migrant workers were relatively large in the mid-2000s, especially amongst Ukrainians, these have fallen following changes to UK immigration policy,...

This study evaluates potential migration flows to the European Union from its eastern neighbors and Croatia. We perform out-of-sample forecasts using an adaption of the model of Hatton (1995) to time series cross-sectional data about post-enlargement migration flows following the EU's 2004...

Ireland, along with Sweden and the UK, allowed full access to its labour market to the citizens of the accession countries when the EU enlarged in May 2004. Given the limited number of countries that opened up and the rapid pace of economic growth in Ireland around 2004, a significant inflow was...