In response to surging immigration pressure in Europe and the United States, Western policymakers advocate foreign aid as a means to fight the 'root causes' of irregular migration. This article provides the first global evidence of the effects of aid on migration preferences, migration flows,...

Since policymakers increasingly regard foreign aid as a means to manage international flows of migrants, it is important to obtain accurate empirical evidence on the complex link between aid and migration. Recent research has shown that the impact of foreign assistance on migrant flows is highly...

This article analyzes whether foreign aid affects the net flows of refugees from recipient countries. Combining refugee data on 141 origin countries over the 1976-2013 period with bilateral Official Development Assistance data, we estimate the causal effects of a country’s aid receipts on both...

In response to the recent migrant and refugee crisis, rich countries have redoubled policy efforts to deter future immigration from poor countries by addressing the "root causes" of migration. We review existing evidence on the effectiveness of such efforts. First, aid disbursements do not...

Comparing the emigration rates of countries at different stages of economic development, an inverse u-shape emerges. Although merely based on cross-sectional evidence, the “migration hump” is often treated as a causal relationship. Since the peak is located at rather high per capita incomes...

This paper investigates through which channels foreign aid impacts migration to donor countries. To disentangle the non-donor-specific channels (development and credit constraint channels) from the donor-specific channels (information and instrumentation channels), we use the fact that...

Comparing the emigration rates of countries at different stages of economic development, an inverse u-shape emerges. Although merely based on cross-sectional evidence, the "migration hump" is often treated as a causal relationship. Since the peak is located at rather high per capita incomes of...

We report a small-sample, preliminary evaluation of the economic impact of temporary overseas work by Haitian agricultural workers. This work occurs in the United States in the context of a pilot program designed as a form of post-disaster development assistance to Haiti. We find that the...

Conditional Cash Transfers are increasingly used by development aid agencies to reduce the incentives for migration from low-income countries. The evidence to date suggests that such transfers typically increase the rate of migration when they are conditional on investment, such as investment in...

This paper models the short and medium-run impact of aid on migration, considering alternatively the effect of unconditional and conditional cash transfers to financially constrained households. Data from the evaluation of a Mexican development program, Progresa, are used to estimate the effect...