Over 200 million people worldwide live outside their country of birth and typically experience large gains in material well-being by moving to where incomes are higher. But effects of migration on subjective well-being are less clear, with some studies suggesting that migrants are miserable in...

We compare successful and unsuccessful applicants to a migration lottery in order to examine the impact of migration on objective and subjective well-being. The results show that international migration brings large improvements in objective well-being. Impacts on subjective well-being are...

In this paper, we measure the implications of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Palestinian employment and earnings. We quantify the conflict by the frequency of temporary closures of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the number of overseas foreign workers in the Israeli labor market. Data on...

This paper investigates Dutch immigrants’ naturalisation decision and how naturalisation affects their employment chances and wages in the Netherlands. The population under consideration consists mainly of refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia and former Yugoslavia, and a minority of...

This paper presents a first attempt at understanding some of the many issues involved in the granting of an amnesty to illegal immigrants. We consider government behavior with respect to allocations on limiting infiltration (border control) and apprehending infiltrators (internal control) and...

Literature examining immigrants’ educational disadvantage across countries focuses generally on average differences in educational outcomes between immigrants and natives disguising thereby that immigrants are a highly heterogeneous group. The aim of this paper is to examine educational...

This conceptual paper, prepared for a United Nations Expert Group Meeting on Migration and Development, is concerned with the international mobility of high-skilled workers, previously referred to as the "brain drain". After discussing the historical background of high-skilled international...

The main interest of this paper is to compare the value of education systems of different countries. For this reason I use data on workers who have completed their education before immigrating to Switzerland to estimate a country specific return to education. I estimate the standard...

Economists studying the economic behaviour of immigrants have tended to avoid serious interdisciplinary work. I argue that when presented with a particular set of research questions that lend themselves to a utility maximisation framework, an economist will be able to pursue interdisciplinary...