Migration is often viewed as an investment decision. Temporary migrants can be expected to invest less in accumulating human capital specific to the host country. Instead, they work more hours in order to accumulate savings and invest in financial capital that can be transferred back to their...

The quality dimension of immigrant human capital has received little attention in the economic assimilation literature. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how human capital acquired in different source countries may be adjusted according to its quality in the Canadian labor market....

Very little is understood about how immigrants affect the happiness, or subjective well-being of natives. We use the European Social Survey to analyze the effects of aggregate immigration flows on the subjective well-being of native-born populations in a panel of 26 countries between 2002 and...

We examine two impacts of international emigration on the evolution of the institutions in the origin countries. The first impact concerns the influence of emigration per se (i.e. people who left the country can voice more or less from abroad). The second impact relates to the transfer of the...

This paper examines how immigrants’ optimal migration duration in the host country responds to the purchasing power parity (ppp) and relative wages between the host and source countries. A theoretical model of joint migration duration and saving decisions reveals that the optimal migration...

This paper first develops a structural micro-founded model of aggregate net migration flow using matching ideas to study how migrants choose between multiple locations using multiple criteria. Migration should reduce inequality in the criteria. Most migration models either do not handle multiple...

This paper exploits the episode provided by the mass migration from the former Soviet Union to Israel in the 1990s to study the effect high skill immigration on productivity. Using a unique data set on manufacturing firms, I investigate directly whether firms and industries with a higher...

This paper analyzes the self-selection patterns among Mexican return migrants during the period 1990–2010. To calculate the selection patterns, we nonparametrically estimate the counterfactual wages that the return migrants would have experienced had they never migrated by using the wage...

Previous research on the determinants of international migration has largely focused on objective factors, such as income. We instead use subjective well-being (SWB) to explain international migration desires, an expressed willingness to migrate. We find that individuals with higher SWB have...

Mobile workers involve flows of labor and human capital and contribute to a more efficient allocation of resources. However, migration also changes relative wages, alters the distribution of skills and affects equality in the receiving society. The paper suggests that skilled immigration...