This paper uses survey data on employment immigrants in Australia and the United States to identify the main determinants of the size and skill composition of employment immigrants to developed countries. Our approach emphasizes the key roles of world prices of skills and country proximity. Our...

Attracting skilled immigrants is emerging as an important policy goal for immigrant receiving countries. This article first discusses the economic rationale for immigrant selection. Selection mechanisms of receiving countries are reviewed in the context of deteriorating labor market outcomes for...

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...

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the demand for high-skilled workers using a new firm data set, the IZA International Employer Survey 2000. Our results suggest that while workers from EU-countries are mainly complements to domestic high-skilled workers, workers from non-EU countries...

Migration is an unavoidable aspect of globalization. While full flexibility is politically unfeasible, the paper argues for regulated openness. Migration in the age of globalization should be judged according to the labor market needs of the receiving countries. This would also serve best the...

Economic theory suggests that high-skilled immigration generally has positive effects on the receiving economy. International student mobility is an important channel through which high-skilled immigrants arrive. The purpose of this paper is to identify some of the key determinants of...

Switzerland radically changed its migration policy in the mid-nineties from a non-qualified only policy to one that favors the immigration of highly qualified migrants. To analyze the impact of this change on the schooling outcomes of migrants, this paper compares the PISA (OECD Programme for...

This paper examines ethnicity among highly skilled immigrants to the United States. The paper focuses on five classic components of ethnicity -country of birth, race, skin color, language, and religion - among persons admitted to legal permanent residence in the United States in 2003 in the...

In the extensive job search literature, studies assume either sequential or non-sequential search. Which assumption is more reasonable? This paper introduces a novel method to test the hypothesis that firms search sequentially based on the relationship between the number of (rejected) job...