There is an extensive literature examining the determinants of self-employment. These studies have mainly failed to account for the differences in entrepreneurial spirit across countries. This paper explores the role of culture in self-employment by exploiting variation in historical...

Razin and Sadka (1999) show that unskilled immigration is beneficial to all income and all age groups in society, even if immigrants are net beneficiaries of the welfare system. Among other things, this result rests on the assumptions that immigrants have the same reproduction rate as the native...

We present a theory that systematically and causally links the well-being of native inhabitants with variation in the extent of the assimilation of migrants. Recent empirical findings are yielded as predictions of the theory.

In this paper we present and confront the main comparative static results - effects of labor supply, demand and institutional wage movements - of the (a) basic two-sector model in six different scenarios: free market; partial (one-sector) coverage with perfect intersector mobility; partial...

This paper investigates the role that pre-immigration skills play in immigrants job-finding processes in Germany. We first show theoretically that the job-finding rate for the high-skilled varies depending on their search strategy: if they are prepared to look for both unskilled as well as...

Survey data for a large sample of recent graduates from 37 German universities are used to study labor market outcomes of highly skilled young women and immigrants. Our results indicate a systemic wage gap for women, but not for male immigrants. We find no evidence that female immigrants suffer...

Ever since Sjaastad (1962), researchers have struggled to quantify the psychic cost of migration. We monetize psychic cost as the wage premium for moving to a culturally different location. We combine administrative social security panel data with a proxy for cultural difference based on unique...

This paper looks at the e ffect of cultural barriers on the skill selection of international migration. The data covers bilateral migration stocks by skill level in 2000 from about 99 sending countries to the main 15 destination countries. We use genetic distance as a proxy for cultural distance...

Even though ethnic clustering is common, both economic theory and empirical research have not been able to provide a clear-cut answer on its effects on the integration of immigrants. In this paper, we study the effect of residential clustering on the labour market outcome of immigrants in...

Economic factors and individual attitudes have an impact on the mobility of university graduates. At this point of the life, mobility is highest, but still little is known about the process leading to actually starting a job at a certain place. The paper at hand investigates the job search...