A growing number of OECD countries are leaning toward adopting quality-selective immigration policies. The underlying assumption behind such policies is that more skill-selection should raise immigrants' average quality (or education level). This view tends to neglect two important dynamic...

Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the emigration episode that started in the late 1990s strongly affected political preferences and electoral outcomes in Moldova during the following...

The gravity model has provided a tractable empirical framework to account for bilateral flows not only of manufactured goods, as in the case of merchandise trade, but also of financial flows. In particular, recent literature has emphasized the role of information costs in preventing larger...

The diversity of people has economic costs and benefits. Using recent immigration data from 195 countries, we propose an index of diversity based on people's birthplaces. This new index is decomposed into a "size" (share of foreign born) and a "variety" (diversity of immigrants) component and is...

Recent theoretical studies suggest that migration prospects can raise the expected return to human capital and thus foster education investment at home or, in other words, induce a brain gain. In a recent paper we used the DOCQUIER and MARFOUK [2006] data set on emigration rates by education...

We investigate the relationship between remittances and migrants’ education both theoretically and empirically, using original bilateral remittance data. At a theoretical level we lay out a model of remittances interacting migrants’ human capital with two dimensions of immigration policy:...

International migration is an important determinant of institutions, not considered so far in the empirical growth literature. Using cross-section and panel analysis for a large sample of developing countries, we find that openness to emigration (as measured by the general emigration rate) has a...

We present an empirical evaluation of the growth effects of the brain drain for the source countries of migrants. Using recent US data on migration rates by education levels (Carrington and Detragiache, 1998), we find empirical support for the ”beneficial brain drain hypothesis” in a...

Recent theoretical studies suggest that migration prospects can raise the expected return to human capital and thus foster education investment at home or, in other words, induce a brain gain. In a recent paper (Beine, Docquier and Rapoport, Economic Journal, 2008) we used the Docquier and...

We consider an ethnically-divided developing country, where education is the only investment outlet and the minority is subject to governmental discrimination. We endogenize ethnic discrimination in a political economy framework, and investigate how it is affected by migration prospects. We show...