Illegal migrants supply a valuable productive input: effort. But their status as illegals means that these migrants face a strictly positive probability of expulsion. A return to their country of origin entails reduced earnings when the wage at origin is lower than the wage at destination. This...

Extending both the harmful brain drain literature and the beneficial brain gain literature, this paper analyzes both the negative and the positive impact of migration by skilled individuals in a unified framework. The paper extends the received literature on the harmfulbrain drain by showing...

This paper synthesizes and extends recent research on The New Economics of the Brain Drain. In a unified framework, the paper shows that while recently identified adverse repercussions of the brain drain exacerbate the long-recognized impacts of the brain drain, longer-term consequences turn the...

Drawing on the literature of occupational status and social distance, a theory is developed of labor migration that is prompted by a desire to avoid 'social humiliation.' A closed-economy general equilibrium model that incorporates occupational status and examines the interaction between the...

This paper presents a set of reflections on what gives rise to remittances, which constitute a major part of the impact of migration on economic development in the migrants' own countries. The collage of reasons presented serves to illustrate that remittance behavior is the outcome of an...

The naturalization of asylum seekers is modeled as an economic problem. In choosing their level of investment in host-country-specific human capital, asylum seekers take into consideration the probability of their being naturalized. The government of the host country chooses the probability of...

It stands to reason that social unrest does not erupt out of the blue. Although there are a great many reasons why social dismay might descend into social disorder, only few yardsticks or indices can plausibly be used to gauge the potential for social unrest (PSU). If policy makers want to...

Consider a population of farmers who live around a lake. Each farmer engages in trade with his two adjacent neighbors. The trade is governed by a prisoner's dilemma 'rule of engagement'. A farmer's payoff is the sum of the payoffs from the two prisoner's dilemma games played with his two...

In a haystack-type representation of a heterogeneous population that is evolving according to a payoff structure of a prisoner's dilemma game, migration is modeled as a process of swapping" individuals between heterogeneous groups of constant size after a random allocation fills the haystacks,...

Migration behavior by individuals, migration decisions and migration outcomes are not neutral to the needs and constraints facing the migrants' families who stay put. In this paper we present and analyze evidence from the Philippines suggesting that the choice of migrant members and migration...