This paper explores the relationship between economic openness and income per person using cross-country data. To address endogeneity concerns we extend the instrumental-variables strategy first used by Frankel and Romer (1999). First, we show that bilateral geographic characteristics of...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature on the determinants of international migration flows. First, we compile a new dataset on annual bilateral migration flows covering 15 OECD destination countries and 120 sending countries for the period 1980-2006. We also collect data on...

In this paper we analyze the impact of immigrants on the type and quantity of native jobs. We use data on fifteen Western European countries during the 1996-2010 period. We find that immigrants, by taking manual-routine type of occupations pushed natives towards more complex (abstract and...

This paper uses census and survey data to identify the wage earning ability and the selection of recent Romanian migrants and returnees. We construct measures of selection across skill groups and estimate the average and the skill-specific premium for migration and return for three typical...

In this paper we estimate the dynamic relationship between resources used in R&D by some OECD countries and their innovation output as measured by patent applications. We first estimate a long-run cointegration relation using recently developed tests and panel estimation techniques. We find that...

Italy makes for a very interesting case study of the impact of social variables on economic performance. Across its provinces, differences in social and cultural attitudes seem associated to large differences in economic development. We analyze the importance of some social variables on...

In this paper we estimate the dynamic relationship between employment in R&D and generation of knowledge as measured by patent applications across OECD countries. In several recently developed models, known as 'idea-based' models of growth, the afore mentioned ideagenerating process is the...

Many workers with low levels of educational attainment immigrated to the United States in recent decades. Large inflows of less educated immigrants would reduce wages paid to comparably-educated native-born workers if the two groups are perfectly substitutable in production. In a simple model...

The revival of international migration in the last fifteen years has spurred economists to more systematically study their determinants and consequences. This contribution expands the existing literature in two directions. First we focus on the European Union as a whole and compare it to the US...

Recent influential empirical work has emphasized the negative impact immigrants have on the wages of U.S.-born workers, arguing that immigration harms less educated American workers in particular and all U.S.-born workers in general. Because U.S. and foreign born workers belong to different...