Recent theoretical work on international trade emphasizes the importance of trade elasticity as the fundamental statistic needed to conduct welfare analysis. Eaton and Kortum (2002) proposed a two-step method to estimate this parameter, where exporter fixed effects are regressed on proxies for...

Recent theoretical work on international trade emphasizes the importance of trade elasticity as the fundamental statistic needed to conduct welfare analysis. Eaton and Kortum (2002) proposed a two-step method to estimate this parameter, where exporter fixed effects are regressed on proxies for...

Cultural differences play an important role in shaping migration patterns. The conventional proxies for cross country cultural differences – such as common language, ethnicity, genetic traits or religion – implicitly assume that cultural proximity between two countries is constant over time...

How can the responsibility for refugees be distributed more fairly – globally and within the EU? And how can we curb irregular migration while expanding legal immigration to the benefit of all concerned? The large number of refugees and other migrants who have come to Europe over the last two...

The EU faces major challenges in asylum and migration policy: reorganize the EU asylum system, secure the external border, curb irregular immigration through cooperation with African governments, and support developing countries that host large numbers of refugees from Syria and elsewhere. These...

This paper studies bilateral cultural preferences as an asymmetric dimension of cultural proximity and estimates their effect on greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI). We derive a gravity equation of FDI and test simultaneously the impact of both (a) the preferences of investing countries...

The paper examines the effect of the import of cultural goods as defined by UNESCO (2009): cultural heritage, performance, visual arts, books, audio-visual material and design on emigration decisions. The import of cultural goods, by affecting individual preferences, reduces the cost of any...