Over 200 million people live outside their country of birth and experience large gains in material well-being by moving to where wages are higher. But the effect of this migration on health is less clear and existing evidence is ambiguous because of the potential for self-selection bias. In this...

The decision of whether or not to migrate has far-reaching consequences for the lives of individuals and their families. But the very nature of this choice makes identifying the impacts of migration difficult, since it is hard to measure a credible counterfactual of what the person and their...

Brain drain has long been a common concern for migrant-sending countries, particularly for small countries where high-skilled emigration rates are highest. However, while economic theory suggests a number of possible benefits, in addition to costs, from skilled emigration, the evidence base on...

High-skilled emigration is an emotive issue that in popular discourse is often referred to as brain drain, conjuring images of extremely negative impacts on developing countries. Recent discussions of brain gain, diaspora effects, and other advantages of migration have been used to argue against...

We conduct a randomized experiment in Sri Lanka to measure the impact of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business (SIYB) program. In contrast to existing business training evaluations which are restricted to microfinance...

Over 200 million people worldwide live outside their country of birth and typically experience large gains in material well-being by moving to where incomes are higher. But effects of migration on subjective well-being are less clear, with some studies suggesting that migrants are miserable in...

We use an original panel dataset of migrant departures from the Philippines to identify the responsiveness of migrant numbers and wages to GDP shocks in destination countries. We find a large significant elasticity of migrant numbers to GDP shocks at destination, but no significant wage...

The majority of firms in most developing countries are informal. We conducted a field experiment in Sri Lanka which provided incentives for informal firms to formalize. Offering only information about the registration process and reimbursement for direct registration costs had no impact on...

Two of the most salient trends surrounding the issue of migration and development over the last two decades are the large rise in remittances, and an increased flow of skilled migration. However, recent literature based on cross-country regressions has claimed that more educated migrants remit...

The impacts of international migration on development in the sending countries, and especially the effects on remaining household members, are increasingly studied. However, comparisons of households in developing countries with and without migrants are complicated by a double-selectivity...