This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of refugee migration, with emphasis on the current refugee crisis. After first reviewing the institutional framework laid out by the Geneva Convention for Refugees, we demonstrate that, despite numerous attempts at developing a common European asylum...

Ever since the major inflow of refugees (the "refugee crisis") in 2015 and 2016, there has been heated debate about the appropriate distribution of refugees in the EU. Current policies revolve around mandatory quotas, which disregard the preferences of EU members and refugees alike. This problem...

The Common European Asylum System calls for increased coordination of the EU countries' policies towards asylum seekers and refugees. In this paper, we provide a formal analysis of the effects of coordination, explicitly modelling the democratic process through which policy is determined. In a...

The U.S. asylum system is noble, but flawed. Scholars have long recognized that asylum is a “scarce” political resource, but U.S. law persists in distributing access to asylum based on an asylum seeker’s ability to circumvent migration controls rather than the strength of the asylum...

We find consistent evidence of negative autocorrelation in decision-making that is unrelated to the merits of the cases considered in three separate high-stakes field settings: refugee asylum court decisions, loan application reviews, and major league baseball umpire pitch calls. The evidence is...

We study the impact of asylum waiting, exploiting a rapid increase in processing times for asylum seekers to Sweden. Longer waiting slows down integration. Accumulated earnings during the first four years after application are 2.3 percent lower per added month of waiting. The impact is due to...

On October 29, 2004, a Russian military deserter from the war in Chechnya was granted political asylum in the United Kingdom. This was a problematic case for the authorities, not least because the deserter claimed a conscientious objection only to fighting in that particular war. There is no...

This article examines how international relation dynamics shape asylum policies. Using data on asylum applications in the European Union (EU) and international events from 1999 to 2017, we document that EU Member States admit relatively more refugees when diplomatic relations with the country of...