Recent controversy has surrounded the relative value of public and private sector remuneration. We propose a comprehensive measure of Total Reward (TR) which includes not just pay, but pensions and other ‘benefits in kind’, evaluate it as the present value of the sum of all these payments...

This paper assesses the long-run toll taken by a large-scale technological disaster on welfare, well-being and mental health. We estimate the causal effect of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe after 20 years by linking geographic variation in radioactive fallout to respondents of a nationally...

This article investigates the determinants of temporary migration and the destination choices of migrants from a geopolitically important region in eastern Europe that borders Russia and the enlarged EU. We present empirical evidence from a novel survey simultaneously conducted in Armenia,...

It is widely debated whether immigrants who live among co-ethnics are less willing to integrate into the host society. Exploiting the quasi-experimental guest worker placement across German regions during the 1960/70s as well as information on immigrants’ inter-ethnic contact networks and...

This paper analyses incomes and socioeconomic status of internal migrants over time and in comparison to their new neighbors and investigates whether status consumption is a way for newly arrived city dwellers to signal their social standing. Using a novel dataset from the emerging economy of...

The observation that some immigrants choose not to integrate into the host society has caused political controversies across European states. This paper hypothesizes that immigrants can exploit social networks of different scales in order to substitute for costly integration. Using a novel...

This study uses an unanticipated, exogenous doubling of the legal minimum pension in Ukraine as a unique quasi-experiment to evaluate the income effect on various aspects of labour supply among the elderly. In contrast to previous studies, the unusually simple pension eligibility rule allows...

This paper investigates the economic returns to language skills and bilingualism. The analysis is staged in Kazakhstan, a multi-ethnic country with complex ethnic settlement patterns that has switched its official state language from Russian to Kazakh. Using two newly assembled data sets, we...