Welfare programs are important for reducing poverty but create incentives for recipients to maximize their income by either reducing labor supply or manipulating taxable income. In this paper, we quantify the extent of such behavioral responses for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the US....

High-skilled workers are four times more likely to migrate than low-skilled workers. This skill bias in migration – often called brain drain – has been at the center of a heated debate about the welfare consequences of emigration from developing countries. In this paper, we provide a global...

This paper studies the impact of immigration on public policy setting. As a natural experiment, we exploit the sudden arrival of eight million forced migrants in West Germany after World War II. These migrants were on average poorer than the West German population, but unlike most international...

The enlargement of the European Union provides a unique opportunity to study the impact of the lifting of migration restrictions on the migrant sending countries. With EU enlargement in 2004, 1.2 million workers from Eastern Europe emigrated to the UK and Ireland. I use this emigration wave to...

Around 9% of the Lithuanian workforce emigrated to Western Europe after the enlargement of the European Union in 2004. I exploit this emigration wave to study the effect of emigration on wages in the sending country. Using household data from Lithuania and work permit and census data from the UK...

We study how the EU enlargement in 2004 and the Great Recession in the late 2000s have shaped the scale and composition of migration flows from the New Member States to Germany. We demonstrate that immigration increased substantially despite the restrictions on the German labor market, and that...

Migrants are typically self-selected from the population of their home country. While a large literature has identified the causes of self-selection, we turn in this paper to the consequences. Using a combination of non-parametric econometrics and calibrated simulation, we quantify the impact of...

Diaspora networks provide information to future migrants and influence both their decision to migrate and their success in the host country. While the existing literature explains the effect of networks on migration decisions through the size of the migrant community, we show that the quality of...

This paper studies the long-term effect of radiation on cognitive skills. We use regional variation in nuclear fallout caused by the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, which led to a permanent increase in radiation levels in most of Europe. To identify a causal effect, we exploit the fact that the...

One of the fundamental questions in the social sciences is whether modern welfare states can be sustained as countries welcome more immigrants. On theoretical grounds, the relationship between immigration and support for redistribution is ambiguous. Immigration may increase ethnic diversity,...