The idea of selling membership into society is not new, but it has taken on new life with the recent proliferation globally of Immigrant Investor Programs (IIPs). These programs involve the sale of national membership privileges to wealthy foreigners. They are justified by attractive policy...

This paper examines differences in religious behaviors of the native born and immigrants in Europe, measured as self-reported religiosity, frequency of praying, and frequency of church attendance. Using the European Social Survey, we first show that, on average, religiosity of immigrants is...

In regions affected by conflicts, partition, and violence, how does past exposure to such incidences affect attitudes towards members of different social groups? Drawing on the theory of inequity aversion model, we infer that past exposure to conflict and violence can increase an individual's...

This paper examines ethnicity among highly skilled immigrants to the United States. The paper focuses on five classic components of ethnicity -country of birth, race, skin color, language, and religion - among persons admitted to legal permanent residence in the United States in 2003 in the...

This paper examines the determinants of temporary and permanent migration and the impact of the return decision on remittances patterns. Using a new detailed household dataset on migration in the Republic of Moldova, it is shown that return is determined by the economic conditions at home and...

This paper explores the factors that account for the receipt of remittances across households in Moldova who have migrant family members abroad. Unlike most of the existing literature, we approach our research question from the perspective of the recipient household and use it to interpret the...

The issue of migration and development became in the last years highly relevant on the global policy agenda. Countries and international organisations increasingly perceive migration as a phenomenon that can positively impact development in both migrant receiving and sending countries, provided...

For many countries, remittance behaviour by migrants is an important component of their overall international financial flows. To date, the empirical literature has analysed the propensity to remit as a function of migrants’ socio-economic characteristics. However, no studies have fully...

Using a recent Spanish database, we show that remittances respond to cross country differences in portfolio values. This behavior suggests that immigrants are sophisticated economic optimizers who take advantage of opportunities to invest trans-nationally given the networks that immigrants are...

Recent theoretical work shows that precautionary savings increase in response to an increase in first-order risk. In addition, it is known that the welfare state, being an insurance or consumption-smoothing mechanism, reduces the negative welfare effect of future income uncertainty. We build a...