In this paper we show that highly skilled undocumented migrants are more likely to return home than migrants with low or no skills when illegality causes quot;skill waste,quot; i.e., when illegality reduces the rate of return of individual capabilities (i.e., skills and human capital) in both...

This paper uses U.S. time-diary surveys to study the allocation of time devoted to informal learning and education by immigrants and natives. We develop a simple theoretical framework, which highlights the different constraints and opportunity costs faced by immigrants as compared with natives....

The diversification of production and trade is considered almost unanimously a fundamental policy goal, particularly for developing economies whose export baskets are heavily concentrated on a few products. In what direction trade diversification ought to take place is, however, subject to...

The existing economic literature focuses on the benefits that return migrants offer to their home country in terms of entrepreneurship, human and financial capital accumulation. However, return migration can have modest or even some detrimental effects if the migration experience was...

We analyze the impact of globalization on the incentive to strengthen regional integration. In a simple three-country oligopolistic trade model, we demonstrate that increased external competitive pressure may induce governments, influenced by producer interests, to lower intra-regional trade...

The set of available local ‘capabilities' determines what an economy produces today (its static comparative advantage) and, at the same time, defines the trajectories that the process of structural change may take in the future. The Product Space (PS) framework developed in recent seminal...

Is international migration an adaptation strategy to sudden or gradual climatic shocks? In this paper we investigate the direct and the indirect role of climatic shocks in developing countries as a determinant of out-migration flows toward rich OECD countries in the period 1990-2001. Contrarily...

In this paper we study the allocation of time devoted to informal learning and education, i.e. those activities carried out during leisure time and outside formal education courses which boost individuals' human and social capital. For immigrants the private investment in these activities is...