France experienced the demographic transition before richer and more educated countries. This paper offers a novel explanation for this puzzle that emphasizes the diffusion of culture and information through internal migration. It tests how migration affected fertility by building a decennial...

We empirically investigate the relationship between a country's economic complexity and the diversity in the birthplaces of its immigrants. Our cross-country analysis suggests that birthplace diversity is strongly and positively associated with economic complexity. This holds particularly for...

We examine both theoretically and empirically how migration affects cultural change in home and host countries. Our theoretical model integrates various compositional and cultural transmission mechanisms of migration-based cultural change for which it delivers distinctive testable predictions on...

How does immigration affect export performance? To answer this question we propose a unified empirical framework allowing to disentangle various mechanisms such as the role of networks in reducing bilateral transaction costs as well as productivity shifts arising from migration-induced knowledge...

The current EU Asylum policy is widely seen as ineffective and unfair. We propose an EU-wide market for tradable quotas on both refugees and asylum-seekers coupled with a matching mechanism linking countries' and migrants' preferences. We show that the proposed system can go a long way towards...

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...

We exploit the non-linearity in the level of minimum wages across US States created by the coexistence of federal and state regulations to investigate how minimum wages affect the labor market impact of immigration. We find that the effects of immigration on labor market outcomes of native...

International migration is maybe the single most effective way to alleviate global poverty. When a given host country allows more immigrants in, this creates costs and benefits for that particular country as well as a positive externality for individuals and governments who care about world...

In a global context foreign direct investment (FDI) and migration substitute one another in the matching process between workers and firms. However, as labor flows can lead to the formation of business networks, migration can actually facilitate FDI in the long-run. We first present a stylized...

During the early 1990s Germany received over half a million Yugoslavian refugees fleeing war. By 2000, many of these refugees, who were under temporary protection, had been repatriated. We exploit this historical episode to provide causal evidence on the role that migrants play explaining export...