This Paper studies the internal commitment mechanisms or ‘personal rules’ (diets, exercise regimens, resolutions, moral or religious precepts, etc.) through which people seek to achieve self-control. Our theory is based on the idea of self-reputation over one’s willpower, which potentially...

This paper tackles the issue of the optimality of agglomeration in a two-region economy with skilled/mobile and unskilled/immobile workers. The market leads to the optimal outcome when transport costs are high or low. However, for intermediate values, it yields agglomeration whereas dispersion...

This paper investigates the possibility of endogenous fluctuations in the international distribution of economic activities in the presence of increasing returns, monopolistic competition, trade and convex adjustment costs without allowing for any local productive externalities. Using a...

There are few studies on occupational choices in Germany, and second-generation occupational choice and mobility is even less investigated. Such research is important because occupations determine success in the labour market. In a country like Germany occupations also reflect a general...

We introduce the idea that informational cascades can explain the observed regularity that emigrants from the same locations also tend to choose the same foreign locations. Thus informational cascades generates herd behaviour. Herd behaviour is compared with the network externalities explanation...

The literature, starting with Chiswick (1977, 1978) to Gang and Zimmermann (2000) more recently, focuses on the economic achievements and performance of first- and second-generation migrants. This Paper presents a three-generation migrant analysis, comparing relative economic performance of...

Using a large new data set, we analyse the labour market performance of Portuguese workers in Germany. While previous work compares wages and characteristics of migrants only to those of natives, we match the data also with an equivalent survey from the sending country. We find that Portuguese...

We study immigration control in a simple one-good model of a homogeneous population in a congested world. We compare quota, the predominant instrument of immigration control, with an entrance price or immigration toll. In our model, an absence of immigration controls (a world of free movement)...

In this paper we document a strong positive correlation of immigration flows with changes in average wages and average house rents for native residents across U.S. states. Instrumental variables estimates reveal that the correlations are compatible with a causal interpretation from immigration...