There is a well-established high quality literature on the role of networks, particularly ethnic networks, in international trade. Ethnic networks are a way of overcoming informal barriers (information costs, risk and uncertainty) to trade by building trust and substituting for the difficulty of...

We examine who benefits when there is a strong leader in place, and those who benefit when a situation lacks a proper leader. There are fractious terrorist groups who seek to serve the same people in common cause against a common enemy. The groups compete for rents obtained from the public by...

The willingness to migrate and locational choice may be influenced by others? choices or plans, particularly if the ?other people?, such as family and friends, are migrants, former migrants, or potential migrants themselves. We examine the roles ?other people? play in influencing an individual?s...

In this paper we study the endogenous determination of minimum wage employing a political-economic game-theoretic approach. A major objective of the paper is to clarify the crucial role of the strength of the workers? union and of political culture on the determination of the minimum wage. In...

The social contract of the welfare state can be strained by the arrival of immigrants who receive welfare payments financed by citizens? taxes. We show, however, that the presence of unemployed immigrants receiving welfare payments is consistent with social harmony. The social harmony, which is...

This paper looks at the situation of legal immigrants who employ illegal immigrants to provide them with various services. This enables the legal immigrants to allocate more time to other work, thereby increasing their earnings. Illegal immigrants employed by legal immigrants may specialize in...

The literature, starting with Chiswick (1977, 1978) to Gang and Zimmermann (2000), more recently, focuses on the economic achievements and performance of first- and secondgeneration migrants. This paper presents a three-generation migrant analysis, comparing relative economic performance of...

This paper presents a first attempt at understanding some of the many issues involved in the granting of an amnesty to illegal immigrants. We consider government behavior with respect to allocations on limiting infiltration (border control) and apprehending infiltrators (internal control) and...

In this paper we analyze the endogenous determination of migration quota viewing it as an outcome of a two-stage political struggle between two interest groups: those in favor and those against the proposed migration quota. We first compare the proposed policies of the two interest groups under...

Empirical studies in the migration literature have shown that migration enclaves (networks) negatively affect the language proficiency of migrants. These studies, however, ignore the choice of location as a function of language skills. Using data on Mexican migration to the US, we show that...