This paper investigates the transferability of human capital across countries and the contribution of imperfect human capital portability to the explanation of the immigrant-native wage gap. Using data for West Germany, our results reveal that, overall, education and labor market experience...

This study estimates separate selectivity bias corrected wage equations for formal and informal workers in rural and urban Mexico using data from the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS). We control for different potential selection patterns using Probit and Multinominal logit models in the first...

This paper studies wage effects and job mobility as a result of skill mismatch in worker- occupation pairs. I develop a Roy model in which learning on the job induces workers to shift more time towards job-specific activities. Using a short task panel containing data on worker’s time...

This study examines the returns to foreign and local language skills of immigrants in the Spanish labor market. Different sources of endogeneity are addressed by deriving a set of novel instruments for language proficiency through a measure of linguistic dissimilarity. Using cross-sectional data...

This study quantifies the disadvantage in the formation of literacy skills of immigrants that arises from the linguistic distance between mother tongue and host country language. Combining unique cross-country data on literacy scores with information on the linguistic distance between languages,...

This paper uses data from the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) to study the returns to language skills of child and adult migrants in the US labor market. We employ an instrumental variable strategy, which exploits differences in language acquisition profiles between immigrants from English-...

Research on the relationship between high-skilled migration and remittances has been limited by the lack of suitable microdata. We create a unique cross-country dataset by combining household surveys from five Sub-Saharan African countries that enables us to analyze the effect of migrants'...

We analyze public expectations about migrants’ provision of work effort as a driving force in the self-selection process of high-skilled migrants. We adopt and extend Piketty’s (1998) theoretical framework of social status and work out how country-specific public expectations affect the...

Following the seminal work of Chiswick (1978), many studies have examined the extent to which earnings of immigrants vary over the settlement process. While these studies usually find that the initial earnings gap between native and immigrant workers in traditional immigration countries...