This book explores the determinants of forced migration and its political implications from an economic perspective. It describes the distribution of burdens from forced migration across countries, and analyzes the strategic interaction of national refugee policies to control refugee flows.

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 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...

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...

Detention of irregular migrants and asylum seekers takes place at the behest and convenience of virtually all liberal states. It is a harmful practice that impacts non-citizens as well as citizens, and has far-reaching ramifications for our understandings of the ethics of immigration and border...

We study the effects of asylum policy on asylum flows. The policy changes are examined both with regard to their direct effect on the flows to the country that made the changes, and with regard to their impact on the inflows to other countries. Finally, we analyse the effect of policy on the...