Many people born in low-income countries would like to leave those countries, but barriers prevent their emigration. Those barriers, according to economists' best estimates to date, cost the world economy much more than all remaining barriers to the international movement of goods and capital...

This study uses a unique natural experiment to test a simple model of international differences in workers' wages and productivity. Large differences in wages across countries could arise from several sources. These include barriers to trade in outputs, differences in technology, differences in...

A question that continues to puzzle development economists is why, despite tremendous efforts to the contrary, we do not see a consistent pattern of wealth convergence between the developed and developing worlds. Drawing upon the post-Apartheid experience of South Africa in which black South...

Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. We study a policy discontinuity in the...

Economists have measured the effects of immigration on native employment primarily with exogenous shifts in the foreign labor supply curve. This paper suggests an alternative, occupation-specific approach: directly describe, for one job, the native labor supply curve. The paper applies this...

Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. We study a policy discontinuity in the...

There has been little rigorous evaluation of immigration barriers intended to improve domestic terms of employment by shrinking the workforce. We study one such barrier, a policy change that excluded almost half a million Mexican bracero seasonal agricultural workers from the United States....

An important class of active labor market policy has received little rigorous impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to improve the terms of employment for domestic workers by deliberately shrinking the workforce. Recent advances in the theory of endogenous technical change suggest...

Concern has intensified in recent years that many instrumental variables used in widely-cited growth regressions may be invalid, weak, or both. Attempts to remedy this general problem remain inadequate. We demonstrate that a range of published growth regressions may contain spurious results...

The US government's proposed $5 billion Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) could provide upwards of $250-$300m or more per year per country in new development assistance to a small number of poor countries judged to have relatively quot;goodquot; policies and institutions. Could this assistance...