It is often argued that tax competition may lead to a "race to the bottom". Such a race may hold indeed in the case of the pure case of factor mobility (such as capital mobility). However, in this paper we emphasize the unique feature of labor migration, that may nullify the "race to the bottom"...

Natives benefit from immigration mainly because of production complementarities between immigrant workers and other factors of production, and these benefits are larger when immigrants are sufficiently `different' from the stock of native productive inputs. The available evidence suggests that...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature on the determinants of international migration flows. First, we compile a new dataset on annual bilateral migration flows covering 15 OECD destination countries and 120 sending countries for the period 1980-2006. We also collect data on...

The pay-as-you-go social security system, increasingly burdened by dwindling labor force, can benefit from immigrants whose birth rates exceed those of the native born birth. The paper examines adynamic political-economy mechanism through which the social security system influences the young...

In the political debate people express the idea that immigrants are good because they can help pay for the old. The paper explores this idea in a dynamic political-economy setup. For this purpose we develop an OLG political economy model of social security and migration. We characterize sub-game...

This paper compares the effects of migration restrictions using licenses which are freely traded in a competitive labor market to those that occur when licenses are allocated to firms who are not permitted to trade them. There is reason to expect that a policy of making licenses non-transferable...

We study the immigration policy that maximizes the welfare of the native population in an economy where the government designs an optimal redistributive welfare system and supplies public goods. We show that when the government can design different tax systems for immigrants and natives, free...

This paper provides overview of recent work on migration and welfare state tax policies: 1. I survey the literature on the tax burden of migration. 2. I empirically identify the differential effect of the generosity of the welfare state on the skill composition of immigrants across the two...

One of the economic benefits of immigration is that the diversity of the population is enhanced. Diversity, it is argued, enriches the environment in which individuals live and trade and may contribute to greater creativity. What does diversity mean? Do current immigration policies enhance...