This paper investigates the role of family ties for international return migration decisions. The presence of children in the household affects return propensities of couples in different ways. Results suggest that schooling considerations as well as factors related to cultural identity play a...

In the process of European integration, regions close to a border are especially affected by labour market liberalisation. Using data from the IAB employment subsample (IABS) and the employment register (BeH) for the period before and after the opening of the border (1980-2001) I shed light on...

Spain has become a country of immigration very fast and in an unusual way. At the beginning of the year 2000, foreigners represented barely 2% of the total population, a figure which rose to 12% and exceeded 5.7 million in 2012. Considering its population size, Spain was the country which...

We analyze the impact of obtaining a residence permit on foreign workers' labor market and residential attachment. To overcome the usually severe selection issues, we exploit a unique migration lottery that randomly assigns access to residence permits for workers with an employment contract in...

This paper employs a wage-setting approach to analyze the labor market effects of immigration into Germany. The wage-setting framework relies on the assumption that wages tend to decline with rising unemployment, albeit imperfectly. This enables us to consider labor market rigidities, which are...

This paper analyses the impact of refugee movements on emergency and development aid allocation decisions of bilateral donors in a political economic framework. We investigate two alternative hypotheses about donor motivations: first, an altruistic burden-sharing policy towards recipient...

Human trafficking is a humanitarian problem of global scale, but quantitative research on the issue barely exists. This paper is a first attempt to explore the economic drivers of human trafficking and migrant exploitation using micro data. We argue that migration pressure combined with informal...

The analysis of how the economic crisis in Europe has reshaped migration flows faces two challenges: (i) the confounding influence of correlated changes in the attractiveness of alternative destinations, and (ii) the role of rapidly changing expectations about the evolution of the economic...