What is the greatest single class of distortions in the global economy? One contender for this title is the tightly binding constraints on emigration from poor countries. Vast numbers of people in low-income countries want to emigrate from those countries but cannot. How large are the economic...

The term "brain drain" dominates popular discourse on high-skilled migration, and for this reason, we use it in this article. However, as Harry Johnson noted, it is a loaded phrase implying serious loss. It is far from clear that such a loss actually occurs in practice; indeed, there is an...

The popular belief that immigrants have a large adverse impact on the wages and employment opportunities of the native-born population of the receiving country is not supported by the empirical evidence. A 10 percent increase in the fraction of immigrants in the population reduces native wages...

Natives benefit from immigration mainly because of production complementarities between immigrant workers and other factors of production, and these benefits are larger when immigrants are sufficiently 'different' from the stock of native productive inputs. The available evidence suggests that...

Over the past few decades of economic reform, China's labor markets have been transformed to an increasingly market-driven system. China has two segregated economies: the rural and urban. Understanding the shifting nature of this divide is probably the key to understanding the most important...

We expect a lot from the middle classes. At least three distinct arguments about the special economic role of the middle class are traditionally made. In one, new entrepreneurs armed with a capacity and a tolerance for delayed gratification emerge from the middle class and create employment and...

Population aging is not a looming crisis of the future -- it is already here. Economic challenges arise when the increase in people surviving to old age and the decline in the number of young people alive to support them cause the growth in society's consumption needs to outpace growth in its...

The share of increases in life expectancy realized after age 65 was only about 20 percent at the beginning of the 20th century for the United States and 16 other countries at comparable stages of development; but that share was close to 80 percent by the dawn of the 21st century, and is almost...

This article is about the economics of migrant remittances sent to developing countries. I review the overall magnitude of remittances and what current research reveals about the motivations for migrant remittances and what effects they have. I discuss field experimental evidence on migrant...

The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have many things in common. Both periods recorded fast growth, convergence, and labor-market integration between OECD members. Both periods witnessed intense debate about who gained and who lost from globalization. Furthermore, the earlier period saw a...