Labor migration to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has massive effects on the GCC, the countries migrants come from, and the migrants themselves and their families. Yet existing research on the effects of Gulf migration is marked by its extreme scarcity, reliance on descriptive...

Large numbers of people born in poor countries would like to leave those countries, but barriers prevent their emigration. Those barriers, according to economists’ best estimates to date, cost the world economy much more than all remaining barriers to the international movement of goods and...

Does the emigration of highly-skilled workers deplete local human capital? The answer is not obvious if migration prospects induce human capital formation. We analyze a unique natural quasi-experiment in the Republic of the Fiji Islands, where political shocks have provoked one of the largest...

We compare the wages of workers inside the United States to the wages of observably identical workers outside the United States—controlling for country of birth, country of education, years of education, work experience, sex, and ruralurban residence. This is made possible by new and uniquely...

Economists have measured the effects of immigration on native employment primarily with exogenous shifts in the foreign labor supply curve. I suggest an alternative, occupation-specific approach- directly describe, for one job, the native labor supply curve. I apply the method to seasonal farm...

The Millennium Villages Project is a high profile, multi-country development project that has aimed to serve as a model for ending rural poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. The project became the subject of controversy when the methodological basis of early claims of success was questioned. The...

This study uses a unique natural experiment to test a simple model of international differences in workers’ wages and productivity. Large differences in wages across countries could arise from several sources. These include barriers to trade in outputs, differences in technology, differences...

Concern has intensified in recent years that many instrumental variables used in widely-cited growth regressions may be invalid, weak, or both. Attempts to remedy this general problem remain inadequate. We demonstrate that a range of published growth regressions may contain spurious results...

The most basic economic theory suggests that rising incomes in developing countries will deter emigration from those countries, an idea that captivates policymakers in international aid and trade diplomacy. A lengthy research literature and recent data suggest something quite different: that...

Research on migration and development has recently changed, in two ways. First, it has grown sharply in volume, emerging as a proper subfield. Second, while it once embraced principally rural-urban migration and international remittances, migration and development research has broadened to...