Over the last decade the locus of policy-making towards asylum seekers and refugees has shifted away from national governments and towards the EU as the Common European Asylum Policy has developed. Most of the focus has been on the harmonisation of policies relating to border control, the...

Do more risk loving migrants opt for self-employment? This is a question especially relevant for policy makers designing selective immigration policies in countries of destination. In order to provide a rigorous answer to it, we use a novel vignette-adjusted measure of risk preferences in the...

Do migrants send remittances as a way of obtaining insurance? While this motive is theoretically suggested in the literature, the question of identifying this relationship empirically has only begun to be explored. Using a unique representative survey of 1500 immigrants in the Greater Dublin...

Different disciplines within the social sciences have produced large theoretical and empirical literatures to explain the determinants of anti-immigration attitudes. We bring together these literatures in a unified framework and identify testable hypothesis on what characteristics of the...

This paper starts with a brief historical overview of immigration in Europe. We then provide a comprehensive analysis of the skill structures of immigrants and their labor market integration in the different European countries, their position in the wage distribution, and the situation of their...

This paper investigates outmigration of Estonian immigrants from Finland and their economic assimilation. We use a register-based panel data set on new Estonian immigrants from years 2000-2006 to analyse the determinants of outmigration in a duration model framework and to examine the economic...

The paper examines the factors that are related to attitudes towards immigrants in Europe, with a particular focus on the role of institutional trust in shaping these attitudes. We go one step further compared to previous studies by investigating separately two different groups of people —...

To examine the impact of migrants on the average firm productivity, wages and welfare we construct a general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003) considering heterogeneous firms with different productivity levels and imperfect substitutability between migrants and...

The 2004 accession of Eastern European countries (EU8) to the European Union has generated concerns about the influx of low-skill immigrants to the Western member states (EU15). Only three countries, namely Ireland, Sweden, and the UK, did not impose restrictions to immigration from Eastern...

While most countries welcome (and some even subsidise) high-skilled immigrants, there is very limited evidence of their importance for domestic firms. To guide our empirical analysis, we first set up a simple theoretical model to show how foreign experts may impact on the productivity and wages...