Remittances and Inequality: A Dynamic Migration Model We develop a model of the interdependencies between migration, remittances and inequality, and investigate how migration and subsequent remittances affect inter-household inequality in the origin communities. An important feature of our model is that we take into account the impact of migration on the local (rural) labor market. Migration is...

Linguistic distance, i.e. the dissimilarity between languages, is an important factor infl uencing international economic transactions such as migration or international trade fl ows by imposing hurdles for second language acquisition and increasing transaction costs. To measure these costs, we suggest to use a new measure of linguistic distance. The Levenshtein distance is an easily computed a...

Previous research has reached mixed conclusions about whether higher levels of immigration reduce the wages of natives. This paper reexamines this question using data from the Current Population Survey and the Immigration and Naturalization Service and focuses on differential effects by skill level. Using occupation as a proxy for skill, we find that an increase in the fraction of workers in an...

Trade Policy and Labor Services: Final Status Options for the West Bank and Gaza This paper considers the policy options of the West Bank and Gaza (WBG) with respect to trade and the exports of labor services. It concludes that i) a non-discriminatory trade policy (NDTP) is unambiguously superior to an FTA with Israel; ii) the WBG should pursue a NDTP with all its neighbors, but only under the ...

How immigration affects the labor market of the host country is a topic of major concern for many immigrant-receiving nations. Spain is no exception following the rapid increase in immigrant flows experienced over the past decades. We assess the impact of immigration on Spanish natives’ incomes by estimating the net immigration surplus under the assumption of perfect and imperfect substitutabil...

In recent years, the economics of migration literature has shown a substantial growth in papers exploring host country impacts beyond the labour market. Specifically, researchers have begun to shift their attention from labour market and fiscal changes, towards exploring what we might call ‘the wider effects of migration’ on the production and consumption sides of the economy – and the role of ...

In this paper, we modify the Harris-Todaro model of migration to incorporate the impact of human capital, housing stock and the availability of publicly provided goods like health care and road provision in order to analyse the determinants of migration in different regions of Poland. We apply the Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equation [SURE] model to investigate the data. Our results show tha...

This paper contrasts labour participation behaviour and wages of native and immigrant women. Since the impact of family structure on labor supply differs between natives and immigrants, we explicitly distinguish between part-time and full-time jobs. The choice of jobs is accounted for by an ordered probit selection model with an incidental threshold, thus offering a flexible strategy to address...

The Economic Payoff of Name Americanization We examine the impact of the Americanization of names on the labor market outcomes of migrants. We construct a novel longitudinal data set of naturalization records in which we track a complete sample of migrants who naturalize by 1930. We find that migrants who Americanized their names experienced larger occupational upgrading. Some, such as those wh...

The paper revisits the local determinants of crime using a spatial model distinguishing between resident and non-resident offenders. Employing data for German municipalities, the model is estimated by means of a spatial GMM approach. Focusing on resident offenders legal earnings opportunities and the expected gain from offenses are found to be important determinants of crime. Also the socio-eco...