This paper develops a model of optimal education choice of an agent who has an option to emigrate. Using a real options framework, we analyze the time evolution of human capital in the home country and investigate the role of migration opportunities in the accumulation of different types of...

Germany’s shortage of skilled workers has sharply increased, especially in the social and education sectors, health and care, construction and skilled crafts, information technology and jobs in science, technology, engineer­ing and mathematics (STEM). Simultaneously, the demand for low...

Models by Rosen (1981) and Tang and Wood (2000) predict that reductions in travel and communication costs increase wage inequality in developed countries, by raising the productivity and earnings of a small group of highly-skilled workers. Time-series analysis reveals that both the relative...

This paper theoretically explores regional firms’ competition in attracting mobile workers under spending cost to evaluate workers’ skills. Using the tax competition literature, we construct a two-region model that expenses on evaluation increase the regional firm productivity. The model...

We document a slowdown in low-skilled immigration that began around the onset of the Great Recession in 2007, which was associated with a subsequent rise in low-skilled wages, a decline in the skill premium, and labor shortages in service occupations. Falling returns to education also coincided...

This paper estimates the causal effect of recruitment competition on the labor demand for high-skilled foreign workers. I assemble a new data set, combining a firm-level panel of all Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) submitted as a first step to obtaining H-1B visas between 2010 and 2019 with...

How do skilled migrant workers affect firms' performance and output? I estimate the causal effect of EU nurse withdrawal after the Brexit referendum on the performance of English hospitals. Exploiting variation in the reliance on EU workers across hospital providers in pre-referendum years, I...