This paper studies the impact of immigration on public policy setting. As a natural experiment, we exploit the sudden arrival of eight million forced migrants in West Germany after World War II. These migrants were on average poorer than the West German population, but unlike most international...

This paper studies the impact of immigration on public policy setting. We exploit the sudden arrival of eight million forced migrants in West Germany after WWII. These migrants were poorer than the local population but had full voting rights and were eligible for social welfare. We show that...

The eastern enlargement of the European Union in 2004 triggered a large flow of migrant workers from the new member states to the UK and Ireland. This paper analyzes the impact of this migration wave on the real wages in the source countries. I consider the case of Lithuania, which had the...

This paper studies the impact of a large emigration wave on real wages in the source country. Following EU enlargement in 2004, a large share of the workforce of the Central and Eastern Europe emigrated to Western Europe. Using data from Lithuania for the calibration of a factor demand model I...

High-skilled workers are four times more likely to migrate than low-skilled workers. This skill bias in migration - often called brain drain - has been at the center of a heated debate about the welfare consequences of emigration from developing countries. In this paper, we provide a global...

Diaspora networks provide information to future migrants and influence both their decision to migrate and their success in the host country. While the existing literature explains the effect of networks on migration decisions through the size of the migrant community, we show that the quality of...

One of the fundamental questions in the social sciences is whether modern welfare states can be sustained as countries welcome more immigrants. On theoretical grounds, the relationship between immigration and support for redistribution is ambiguous. Immigration may increase ethnic diversity,...

One of the fundamental questions in the social sciences is whether modern welfare states can be sustained as countries welcome more immigrants. On theoretical grounds, the relationship between immigration and support for redistribution is ambiguous. Immigration may increase ethnic diversity,...

How migration affects labor markets in receiving countries is well understood, but less is known about how migration affects labor markets in sending countries, particularly the wages of workers who do not emigrate. Most studies find that emigration increases wages in the sending country but...

This paper studies how a student's ordinal rank in a peer group affects performance and specialisation choices in university. By exploiting data with repeated random assignment of students to teaching sections, we find that a higher rank increases performance and the probability of choosing...