Integration of immigrants is a two-way process, the success of which depends both on immigrants and on natives. We provide new evidence on the determinants of individual attitudes towards immigration, using data from the 2005 and 2010 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel. In particular, we...

In this paper, I estimate the effect of increasing labor mobility on personal income tax schedules. I combine rich data on effective personal income tax levels in a panel of OECD countries for the period 1986-2005 with a new Index of Potential Labor Mobility. This index allows to tackle issues...

We draw on two decades of historical data to analyze how regional labor markets in West Germany adjusted to one of the largest forced population movements in history, the mass inflow of eight million German expellees after World War II. The expellee inflow was distributed very asymmetrically...

Illegal migrants supply a valuable productive input: effort. But their status as illegals means that these migrants face a strictly positive probability of expulsion. A return to their country of origin entails reduced earnings when the wage at origin is lower than the wage at destination. This...

This paper provides a novel explanation of 'educated unemployment,' which is a salient feature of the labor markets in a number of developing countries. In a simple job-search framework we show that 'educated unemployment' is caused by the perspective of international migration, that is, by the...

Quite often, migrants appear to exert little effort to absorb the mainstream culture and to learn the language of their host society, even though the economic returns (increased productivity and enhanced earnings) to assimilation are high. We show that when interpersonal comparisons affect...

A framework that yields different possible patterns of migration as optimal solutions to a simple utility maximization problem is presented and explored. It is shown that seasonal migration arises as an optimal endogenous response to a comparison of costs (of living and of separation) and...

At least to some extent migration behavior is the outcome of a preference for migration. The pattern of migration as an outcome of a preference for migration depends on two key factors: imitation technology and migration feasibility. We show that these factors jointly determine the outcome of a...

Extending both the 'harmful brain drain' literature and the 'beneficial brain drain' literature, this paper analyzes both the negative and the positive impact of migration by skilled individuals in a unified framework. The paper extends the received literature on the 'harmful brain drain' by...

This paper synthesizes and extends recent research on 'The New Economics of the Brain Drain.' In a unified framework, the paper shows that while recently identified adverse repercussions of the brain drain exacerbate the long-recognized negative impact of the brain drain, longer-term...