his paper examines an important anomaly in the internal migration history of the former Soviet Union (FSU). While many cities were closed in the sense of explicitly limiting growth of city population from migration, it was difficult to assess the effectiveness of these controls. We analyze a...

The speed at which immigrants assimilate is the subject of debate. Human capital formation plays a major role in this discussion. This paper compares the educational attainment of second generation immigrants to those of natives in the same age cohort. Evidence using a large German data set...

Ethnic networks are a way of overcoming informal barriers to trade such as information costs, risk, and uncertainty by building trust and by substituting for the difficulty of enforcing contracts internationally. We study networks which emerge from the interaction (i) between migrants and...

This paper analyses Russian city growth during the command and transition eras. Our main focus is on understanding the extent to which market forces are replacing command forces, and the resulting changes in Russian city growth patterns. We examine net migration rates for a sample of 171 medium...

This paper examines the political economy of Russian city growth. For the 1980s, we model the growth of 168 Russian cities located in 71 Russian provinces (oblast level). We examine the role of both general socio-economic characteristics and specific state controls. Our goal is to understand the...

In spite of extensive literature on migration in the Soviet Union, we know little about household-level decisions. This study specifies and estimates those variables important to understanding the migration decision. Using data from the Soviet Interview Project (SIP), we examine the forces...