Despite the predictions of standard trade theory, countries in the North are not indifferent between free migration and free trade. Explanations include the redistributive policies of the welfare state (Wellisch and Walz, 1998, this Review). This paper offers an explanation using the concept of social capital and extends the analysis to the South. The movement of people differs from the movemen...

Brides for Sale: Cross-Border Marriages and Female Immigration Every year, a large number of women immigrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in East Asia. This phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s, but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed Asian countries. This paper argues that two factors account for this ...

The Effects of Enforcement on Illegal Markets: Evidence from Migrant Smuggling along the Southwestern Border This paper analyzes how enforcement along the U.S.-Mexican border has affected the market for migrant smugglers. Using a unique dataset that links border crossing histories from illegal Mexican migrants to aggregate enforcement and punishment statistics, we find that the effect of enforc...

Remittances and Chain Migration: Longitudinal Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina Most of the literature on remittances has focused on their implications for the welfare of family members in the country of origin and has disregarded the possibility for remittances to trigger chain migration. In this paper, we address this issue with the use of longitudinal data from Bosnia and Herzegovina, one...

This paper examines differences in educational attainment between natives and children of immigrants to Canada. We introduce two definitions of secondgeneration immigrants: The first considers all children with at least one immigrant parent to be second-generation immigrants, while the second definition requires that both parents were foreign-born. In the data, regardless of which definition we...

This paper investigates gender differences in the spatial mobility of young adults when initially leaving their parental home. Using individual data from 11 waves (2000-2010) of the SOEP we examine whether female home leavers in East Germany move across greater distances than males and whether these differences are explained by the gender gap in education. Our results reveal that female home le...

Most skills acquired through on-the-job training may be specific to an occupation and therefore transferable to some but not all firms. However, economists have typically focused on skills that are either specific to a given firm or skills that are completely general. This paper explores the relationship between the size of the local market for an occupation-specific skill and job-training outc...

Fiscal Competition and the Composition of Public Spending: Theory and Evidence In this paper, we consider fiscal competition between jurisdictions. Capital taxes are used to finance a public input and two public goods, one which benefits mobile skilled workers and one which benefits immobile unskilled workers. We derive the jurisdictions’ reaction functions for different spending categories. We...

Skill Based Immigrant Selection and Labor Market Outcomes by Visa Category Attracting skilled immigrants is emerging as an important policy goal for immigrant receiving countries. This article first discusses the economic rationale for immigrant selection. Selection mechanisms of receiving countries are reviewed in the context of deteriorating labor market outcomes for immigrants across destina...

Taxation and Internal Migration: Evidence from the Swiss Census Using Community-Level Variation in Income Tax Rates We investigate the relationship between income tax rate variation and internal migration for the unique case of Switzerland, whose system of determining tax rates primarily at the community level results in enough variation to permit analysis of their influence on migration. Speci...