The COVID-19 outbreak led the governments of many countries to impose restrictions on non-essential travel to countries affected by coronavirus, indefinitely suspending tourism travel, work visas and immigrant visas. Some countries placed a complete travel ban on all forms of inward or outward...

The remarkable influx of Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in different West African countries in recent years has been met with growing resistance by established local entrepreneurs. Whether the former have a competitive edge over the latter because of distinctive socio-cultural traits, or whether...

This paper revisits the puzzle of immigration policy: standard economic theory predicts that free immigration improves natives' welfare, but (with few historical exceptions) an open door policy is never implemented in practice. What rationalizes the puzzle? We first review the model of...

We study the effect of asymmetric information in the labor market of a country on the occupational choice pattern of immigrants vis-à-vis natives. The choice is limited to self-employment and paid employment. The study is motivated by empirical observations that regular and irregular immigrants...

This paper utilizes the comprehensive data on income taxes paid by immigrants and others and the government transfer payments received by immigrants and others provided by the 2006 Census from income tax statistics. The Census data was recently made available to researchers in the 2006 Census...

This paper examines the poor performance of recent immigrants to Canada in the labour market as revealed in the Statistics Canada Census 2006 Public Use Microdata File (PUMF). It presents the data which shows that immigrants from less developed countries are doing much worse than immigrants from...

The impact of new technology (ICT) on labour markets and welfare is analyzed in a model of matching. First, ICT lowers cost and speed of market access, thus reducing frictions in matching a searching worker to an opportunity. It raises output and lowers the cost of entry for a new firm. The rise...

This paper discusses the performance of recent immigrants in Canada's labour market and reviews some of the literature on the causes of their poor performance. The paper concludes that, using the existing selection system, it is not possible to admit annually as many as 250,000 immigrants who...

This paper presents some of the economic considerations that should underlie Canadian immigration policy from the point of view of an economist. It then reviews the available data on the performance of recent immigrants against this backdrop. It also offers some observations on the changes in...

This paper analyses the determinants of on-the-job search activities of Italian workers. Using several waves of the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) we estimate with a Probit model how individual socio demographic characteristics and economic variables affect the...