Contrary to the welfare magnet hypothesis, empirical evidence suggests that immigration decisions are not made on the basis of the relative generosity of the receiving nation's social benefits. Even when immigrants are found to use welfare more intensively than natives, the gap is mostly...

Several empirical studies find that worker inflows from more productive or otherwise superior firms increase hiring firms' productivity. We conduct a similar analysis for Germany, using a unique linked employer-employee data set, and ranking sending and hiring establishments by their median...

This paper analyzes the treatment of commuting expenses by the income tax code from a normative and a positive point of view within a continuous space framework with endogenous residence choices and perfect labor mobility. As commuting expenses should never be deductible from the income tax base...

This paper studies Krugman's (1991) core-periphery model and extends it to include environmental pollution. We present the first analytic proof that only an even spreading of the firms over both of the two regions or a complete agglomeration of all manufacturing firms in one region are possible...

Do labor mobility, and co-worker networks contribute to convergence or divergence between regions? Based on the previous literature, labor mobility contributes to knowledge transfer between firms. Therefore, mobility may contribute to decreasing productivity differences, while limited mobility...

We study a reform that granted European cross-border workers free access to the Swiss labor market and had a stronger effect on regions close to the border. The greater availability of cross-border workers increased foreign employment substantially. Although many cross-border workers were highly...

What is the effect of opening the labor market to foreign workers on the success of firms? We address this question by analyzing how firms in Switzerland were affected by the introduction of the free movement of persons with the European Union (EU) countries. This immigration reform granted all...