Determinants of International Migration to the OECD in a Three-Way Dynamic Panel Framework

This paper investigates the determinants of bilateral immigrant ows to 19 OECD countries between 1998 and 2007 from both advanced and developing origin countries. We pay particular attention to dynamics by including both the lagged migrant ow and the migrant stock to capture partial adjustment and network effects. To correct for the dynamic panel data bias of the fixed effects estimator we use a bootstrap algorithm. Our results indicate that immigrants are primarily attracted by better income opportunities abroad. We find evidence for both partial adjustment and the presence of strong network effects.