Drawing on the literature of occupational status and social distance, a theory is developed of labor migration that is prompted by a desire to avoid "social humiliation". A closed-economy general equilibrium model that incorporates occupational status and examines the interaction between the...

This paper develops a model of voluntary migration into degrading work. The essence of the model is a tension between two "bads" that which arises from being relatively deprived at home, and that which arises from engaging in humiliating work away from home. Balancing between these two "bads"...

An increase in the probability of work abroad, where the returns to schooling are higher than at home, induces more individuals in a developing country to acquire education, which leads to an increase in the supply of educated workers in the domestic labor market. Where there is a sticky...

A theory is developed of labor migration that is prompted by a desire to avoid "social humiliation". In a general equilibrium framework it is shown that as long as migration can reduce humiliation sufficiently, migration will occur even between two identical economies. Migration increases the...

Quite often, migrants appear to exert little effort to absorb the mainstream culture and to learn the language of their host society, even though the economic returns (increased productivity and enhanced earnings) to assimilation are high. We show that when interpersonal comparisons affect...