Immigrants are typically found to have less wealth and hold it in different forms than the native born. These differences may affect both the economic assimilation of immigrants and overall portfolio allocation when immigrants are a large share of the population, as in New Zealand. In this...

People migrate to improve their well-being, whether through an expansion of economic and social opportunities or a reduction in persecution. Yet a large literature suggests that migration can be a very stressful process, with potentially negative impacts on mental health reducing the net...

The economies of the former Soviet Bloc experienced large declines in output during the decade of transition which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet there are many reasons to believe that measured output and official deflators provide a poor proxy for the change in real...

Migration to New Zealand and consequent remittance inflows are dominant features of many Pacific Island countries. Evaluating the effect of these people and money flows on incomes and poverty in the Pacific is potentially complicated by the non-random selection of emigrants. This paper uses the...

Measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non-random selection of migrants from the general population, making it hard to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non-migrants. This paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem, providing an experimental measure of...

The nature and location of urbanization economies and their effects on productivity per worker in China are examined. Unlike previous studies, more accurate resident-based measures of urban scale from the 2010 census are used. The size of urbanization economies is similar to those in other...

Australia launched the Pacific Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme in August 2008. This program was designed to alleviate labor shortages for the Australian horticultural industry by providing opportunities for workers from Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, and Vanuatu to undertake seasonal work. This...

This paper uses a novelty dataset of poor households in peri-urban areas in Vietnam to estimate impacts of small loans on child schooling. The Probit and Negative Binomial model estimates roughly indicate no strong evidence of the effect, especially of informal credit. Formal credit is likely to...

To measure real income growth over time a price index is needed to adjust for changes in the cost of living. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is often used for this task but studies from several countries show the CPI is a biased measure of changes in the cost of living, leading to potentially...

Seasonal migration programs are widely used around the world, and are increasingly seen as offering a potential 'triple-win'- benefiting the migrant, sending country, and receiving country. Yet there is a dearth of rigorous evidence as to their development impact, and concerns about whether the...