This study quantifies the disadvantage in the formation of literacy skills of immigrants that arises from the linguistic distance between mother tongue and host country language. Combining unique cross-country data on literacy scores with information on the linguistic distance between languages,...

Rural-urban migrants in China appear to prefer nearby destination cities. To gain a better understanding of this phenomenon, we build a simple model in which migrants from rural areas choose among potential destination cities to maximize utility. The distance between a migrant's home village and...

We use the recent introduction of tuition fees at public universities in seven of the sixteen German states to identify the effects of tuition fees on university enrollment of first-year students at German public universities. Our study differs from previous research in two important ways....

The Gravity Model is the workhorse for empirical studies in International Economies and it is commonly used in explaining the trade flow between countries. Recently, several studies have showed the importance of taking into account the spatial effect. The standard procedure until now was to...

We assume that all trade costs take the iceberg form and find that distance is responsible for about 40% of the world trade costs. Our results are robust to the choice of the trade model, the sample period, the country groups in terms of income level, and the trade cost elasticity of trade...

This paper contains an initial reconnaissance of the situation in Yunfu, prior to the NanGuang project construction. It provides a brief overview of the trajectory of economic development in Yunfu from an economy that was dominated by primary industries to that by secondary industries. The...