The new European Commission will inherit an impasse in efforts to reform the European asylum system as well as concerns about practices in the management of the EU's external border that contradict humanitarian standards and may even be illegal. While the number of asylum seekers who manage to...

This paper analyses the wage premia associated with workers' occupational use of foreign languages in Germany. After eliminating time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity and other confounding factors, sizable returns of about 10 percent to applying fluent English skills are found. Returns to...

Cosmopolitan or anxious? In order to test the influence of conflicting aspects of identity, German respondents were asked about their attitude towards a Syrian refugee the description of whom was varied in various domains (N=662). Once the refugee is described as being aware of as well as open...

We investigate the interplay of language skills and immigrant stocks in determining bilateral FDI out-stocks of OECD reporting countries. Applying a Poisson panel estimator to 2004-2011 data, we find a robust positive effect of bilateral immigrants on bilateral FDI - provided that residents of...

We investigate the interplay of language skills and immigrant stocks in determining bilateral FDI out-stocks of OECD reporting countries. Applying a Poisson panel estimator to 2004-2011 data, we find a robust positive effect of bilateral immigrants on bilateral FDI – provided that residents of...

We investigate the interplay of language skills and immigrant stocks in determining bilateral FDI out-stocks of OECD reporting countries. Applying a Poisson panel estimator to 2004-2011 data, we find a robust positive effect of bilateral immigrants on bilateral FDI – provided that residents of...

This paper connects insights from the literature on cosmopolitan values in political science, anxiety in social psychology, and identity economics in a vignette-style experiment. We asked German respondents about their attitudes towards a Syrian refugee, randomizing components of his description...