The Commission presented its Green Paper on the Future of the European Asylum system in June 2007. The Green Paper builds on the 2005 Hague Programme Action Plan with its objective of creating a common European asylum system. Such a system aims not only at establishing a level playing field in...

Public policy making on asylum takes place in an environment of intense public scrutiny, strong institutional constraints and international collective action problems. By assessing the relative importance of key pull factors of international migration, this article explains why, even when...

Explicitly redistributive EU policy instruments are rare. This article seeks to account for the recent establishment of the European refugee fund (ERF), and assess its effectiveness in 'promoting a balance of efforts in receiving and bearing the consequences of displaced persons'. It argues that...

This paper presents the methods and preliminary findings from IMPALA, a database that systematically measures the character and stringency of immigration policies. Based on a selection of data for six pilot countries between 1990 and 2008, we document the variation of immigration policies across...

This paper introduces a method and preliminary findings from a database that systematically measures the character and stringency of immigration policies. Based on the selection of that data for nine countries between 1999 and 2008, we challenge the idea that any one country is systematically...

Explicitly redistributive EU policy instruments are rare. This article seeks to account for the recent establishment of the European refugee fund (ERF), and assess its effectiveness in "promoting a balance of efforts in receiving and bearing the consequences of displaced persons." It argues that...