Based on the current European discussion about immigration policy, this paper gives an overview of central economic consequences of immigration for a host country?s labor market. The most important theoretical arguments are presented and evaluated against the available empirical evidence. The...

Over the last decades, Sweden has liberalized its citizenship policy by reducing the required number of years of residency to five for foreign citizens and only two for Nordic citizens. Dual citizenship has been allowed since 2001. During the same period, immigration patterns by country of birth...

Over the last decades, Sweden has liberalized its citizenship policy by reducing the required number of years of residency to five for foreign citizens and only two for Nordic citizens. Dual citizenship has been allowed since 2001. During the same period, immigration patterns by country of birth...

In Switzerland a sudden policy uncertainty shock happened in February 2014 with the close and largely unexpected acceptance of a referendum aiming at limiting free movement of persons. The referendum requires Switzerland to reintroduce annual quotas for immigrants within three years. The...

The H-1B program allows firms in the United States to temporarily hire high-skilled foreign citizens. H-1B workers are highly concentrated among a small number of firms. We develop a theoretical model demonstrating that this phenomenon is an artifact of policy design: When the government...

This paper examines the determinants of long-term international migration to the UK; we explore the extent to which migration is driven by macroeconomic variables (GDP per capita, unemployment rate) as well as law and policy (the existence of "free movement" rights for EEA nationals). We find a...

We estimate the effect of language training on subsequent employment and wages of immigrants under essential heterogeneity. The identifying variation is based on regional differences in language training availability that we use to instrument endogenous participation. Estimating marginal...

We estimate the effect of language training on subsequent employment and wages of immigrants under essential heterogeneity. The identifying variation is based on regional differences in language training availability that we use to instrument endogenous participation. Estimating marginal...

This paper examines the determinants of long-term international migration to the UK; we explore the extent to which migration is driven by macroeconomic variables (GDP per capita, unemployment rate) as well as law and policy (the existence of "free movement" rights for EEA nationals). We find a...

We consider a tax-funded policy of admitting and integrating asylum seekers in a country in which the incomes of the native inhabitants are differentiated; for the sake of simplicity, we assume that there are just two groups of native inhabitants: high-income natives and low-income natives. As a...