This volume was prepared by Jens Ruhose while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes four self-contained chapters that contribute to the understanding of the...

We explore three hitherto poorly understood characteristics of the human trafficking market - the cross-border ease of mobility of traffickers, the relative bargaining strength of traffickers and final buyers, and the elasticity of buyers' demand. In a model of two-way bargaining, the exact...

We exploit the increase in immigration flows into western European countries that took place in the 2000s to assess whether immigration affects crime victimization and the perception of criminality among European natives. Using data from the European Social Survey, the Labour Force Survey and...

We build and estimate a dynamic model of teenagers' choices of schooling and crime, incorporating four factors that may contribute to the different paths taken by different teenagers: heterogeneous endowments, unequal opportunities, uncertainties about one's own ability, and contemporaneous...

In an economy with migration, poverty changes are composed of a number of forces, including the income gains and losses realized by the various migration streams. We present a simple but powerful decomposition methodology that uses panel data to measure the contributions of different migration...

We analyze the effect of China's integration into the world economy on workers in the country and show that one important channel of impact has been internal migration. Specifically, we study the changes in internal migration rates triggered by the reduction in trade policy uncertainty faced by...

The paper revisits the local determinants of crime using a spatial model distinguishing between resident and non-resident offenders. Employing data for German municipalities, the model is estimated by means of a spatial GMM approach. Focusing on resident offenders legal earnings opportunities...

This paper uses a "local average treatment effect" (LATE) framework in an attempt to disentangle the separate effects of criminal and noncriminal gun prevalence on violence rates. We first show that a number of previous studies have failed to properly address the problems of endogeneity, proxy...

This paper uses cross-country and panel data set to test the significance of microfinance on income inequality reduction at the macro level for a sample of 57 developing countries for the periods 2000-2006 and 2007-2013. This study adopts panel data methodologies, such as ordinary least square...

I examine household resource reallocation when financial transfers are sent to other households located elsewhere. The literature has so far focused on the impact of private transfers on the recipients, but not on the senders. In order to handle the endogeneity of transfers, I use the 1997-98...