Barriers to immigration of low-skilled workers from developing countries into the advanced countries prevent many potential migrants from leaving their countries of origin. With very low home-country wages in relation to the cost of undocumented migration, the opportunity to migrate often hinges...

This paper develops a model of optimizing behavior of asylum seekers whose objective is to reach an advanced country. Their personal characteristics and the challenges anticipated along the way determine whether they try to reach the ultimate destination with the aid of human smugglers or by...

This paper examines how attractive investment opportunities available to temporary migrants in their country of origin affect their saving behavior and the optimal duration of stay abroad. The model predicts an inverse U-shaped relationship between migration duration and the expected rate of...

A guest-worker program can be a very flexible and convenient way of meeting labor shortages in a host country, assuming that the migrants obey the rules. This paper investigates the conditions under which guest workers have sufficient incentives for voluntary return to their country of origin...

Guest-worker programs have been providing rapidly growing economies with millions of temporary foreign workers over the last couple of decades. With the duration of stay strictly limited by program rules in most of the host countries and wages paid to guest workers often set at sub-market...

We study the interaction between the optimal immigration policy of a host country and education policy of a source country in a model of international migration of skilled workers. Acquisition of human capital is driven by the academic and career opportunities at home and abroad. Greater...