We develop a general model of legal and illegal immigration to understand the basic tradeoffs faced by a government in the decision to implement an immigration amnesty in the presence of a selective immigration policy. We show that two channels play an important role: an amnesty is more likely...

We study the migration policy set by a welfare maximizing government in a model where immigrant workers differ in their skills and are imperfectly matched with heterogenous occupations. The policy fixes a minimum skill level for legal migrants, and foreign workers that fall below it can only...

This paper estimates the causal effect of the prospect of legal status on the employment outcomes of undocumented immigrants. Our identification strategy exploits a natural experiment provided by the 2002 amnesty program in Italy that introduced an exogenous discontinuity in eligibility based on...

This paper analyses the effect of emigration from Poland around the time of EU accession on the Polish labour market. We develop a simple model that guides our empirical specification and provides a clear interpretation for our estimates. Focussing on the 1998–2007 period for Poland, we...

In this paper, we investigate the fiscal impact of immigration on the UK economy, with a focus on the period since 1995. We provide estimates for the overall immigrant population for the period between 1995 and 2012, and for more recent immigrants who arrived since 2000, distinguishing between...

Over the last decades, the United States has become increasingly integrated in the world economy. Very low trade barriers and comparatively liberal migration policies have made these developments possible. What drove US congressmen to support the recent wave of globalization? While much of the...

e investigate the role of constituents’ preferences in shaping the voting behavior of elected representatives on immigration and trade policy. Using a novel dataset spanning the period 1986-2004, in which we match individual opinion surveys with congressmen roll call votes, we find that...

Surveying recently arrived immigrants in countries lacking a population register poses many challenges. We describe our adaptation of Respondent Driven Sampling, a chain-referral technique, to sample migrants from Pakistan and Poland who had arrived in the UK within the previous 18 months....

This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within a unique data set of 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of misperception of income among all pairs of households belonging to the same network. We show that...

Using data for Germany, we analyze the impact of migration and remittances by developing an open-economy general equilibrium model with heterogeneous households. Within the model, the flows of remittances depend on the altruism of households. Households with higher altruism coefficient derive a...