Illegal migrants supply a valuable productive input: effort. But their status as illegals means that these migrants face a strictly positive probability of expulsion. A return to their country of origin entails reduced earnings when the wage at origin is lower than the wage at destination. This...

This paper provides a novel explanation of "educated unemployment," which is a salient feature of the labor markets in a number of developing countries. In a simple job-search framework we show that "educated unemployment" is caused by the perspective of international migration, that is, by the...

It stands to reason that social unrest does not erupt out of the blue. Although there are a great many reasons why social dismay might descend into social disorder, only few yardsticks or indices can plausibly be used to gauge the potential for social unrest (PSU). If policy makers want to...

Consider a population of farmers who live around a lake. Each farmer engages in trade with his two adjacent neighbors. The trade is governed by a prisoner's dilemma "rule of engagement". A farmer's payoff is the sum of the payoffs from the two prisoner's dilemma games played with his two...

A framework that yields different possible patterns of migration as optimal solution to a simple utility maximization problem is presented and explored. It is shown that seasonal migration arises as an optimal endogenous response to a comparison of costs (of living and of separation) and returns...