Since the inequality of earnings in East Germany has approached West German levels in the late 1990s, the standard Roy model predicts that a positive selection bias of East-West migrants should disappear. Using a switching regression model and data from the IABemployment sample, we find however...

Because their departures are difficultly observed, little is known about the performance of immigrants who leave a region and move to another. This paper shows conditions under which the (conditional) outmigration probability, work probability and the expected earnings of outmigrants are...

This paper analyses Russian city growth during the command and transition eras. Our main focus is on understanding the extent to which market forces are replacing command forces, and the resulting changes in Russian city growth patterns. We examine net migration rates for a sample of 171 medium...

We review the different migration episodes in Spain since the beginning of the 20th century, with special emphasis on the pieces of empirical work that have tried to identify the factors behind them. Migrations abroad for the 1900-1950 and 1950-1973 periods are considered. Foreign immigration is...

In 1997 GDP per capita in East Germany was 57% of that of West Germany, wage rates were 75% of western levels, and the unemployment rate was at least double the western rate of 7.8%. One would expect that if capital flows and trade in goods failed to bring convergence, labor flows would respond,...

This paper analyzes the migration behavior of ethnic groups in the former Soviet Un-ion (FSU) from 1989 to 1999. The two main migration movements have been return migration of ethnic groups to their titular nation and migration of all ethnic groups to the Russian Federation. Using factor...

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...

To date, analysis of the spatial dimension of New Zealand labour markets has been limited to administrative, rather than appropriately-defined functional, geographic units. This paper presents a preliminary classification of New Zealand into local labour market areas using area unit...

We consider taxation by a utilitarian government in the presence of heterogeneous locations within a country. We show that a utilitarian government never equalizes after-tax incomes, even when it can impose group-specific lump-sum taxes. If migration is impossible, a utilitarian government may...

In this paper, we investigate how reductions of barriers to migration affect the decision of middle school graduates to attend high school in rural China. Change in the cost of migration is identified using exogenous variation across counties in the timing of national identity card distribution,...