We draw on two decades of historical data to analyze how regional labor markets in West Germany adjusted to one of the largest forced population movements in history, the mass inflow of eight million German expellees after World War II. The expellee inflow was distributed very asymmetrically...

This paper employs a wage-setting approach to analyze the labor market effects of immigration into Germany. The wage-setting framework relies on the assumption that wages tend to decline with the unemployment rate, albeit imperfectly. This enables us to consider labor market rigidities, which...

Cosmopolitan or anxious? In order to test the influence of conflicting aspects of identity, German respondents were asked about their attitude towards a Syrian refugee the description of whom was varied in various domains (N=662). Once the refugee is described as being aware of as well as open...

Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming an increasingly important destination for international migration. The region hosts immigrants from other African countries and from other parts of the world, such as China. Given high poverty levels and weak social security systems in Sub-Saharan Africa, host...

This paper is concerned with the study of the labor market performance of immigrants. The unemployment rate is used as an indicator and natives as the reference group for the analysis. The analysis proceeds in two steps. In a first step, probit regressions on the unemployment probabilities are...

This paper studies the employment effects of the influx of millions of German expellees to West Germany after World War II. The expellees were forced to relocate to post-war Germany. They represented a complete cross-section of society, were close substitutes to the native West German...

We combine the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), which contains information on US legal immigrants, with the American Community Survey (ACS), which contains information on all immigrants to the U.S., legal and illegal ones. Using econometric methodology proposed by Lancaster and Imbens (1996) we...

Public attitudes toward immigration have attracted much scholarly interest and extensive empirical research in recent years. Despite a sizeable theoretical and empirical literature, no firm conclusions have been drawn regarding the factors affecting immigration opinion. We address this gap...

In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to allow over a million asylum seekers to cross the border into Germany. One key concern at the time was that her decision would signal an open-door policy to aspiring migrants worldwide – thus, increasing migration to Germany in the long-term....

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...