We provide an analytical-behavioral explanation for the observed positive relationship between income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, and the incentive to migrate. We show that a higher total relative deprivation of a population leads to a stronger incentive to engage in...

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...

At least to some extent migration behavior is the outcome of a preference for migration. The pattern of migration as an outcome of a preference for migration depends on two key factors: imitation technology and migration feasibility. We show that these factors jointly determine the outcome of a...

This paper provides a novel explanation of “educated unemployment,” which is a salient feature of the labor markets in a number of developing countries. In a simple job-search framework we show that “educated unemployment” is caused by the perspective of international migration, that is,...

Quite often, migrants appear to exert little effort to absorb the mainstream culture and to learn the language of their host society, even though the economic returns (increased productivity and enhanced earnings) to assimilation are high. We show that when interpersonal comparisons affect...

A framework that yields different possible patterns of migration as optimal solutions to a simple utility maximization problem is presented and explored. It is shown that seasonal migration arises as an optimal endogenous response to a comparison of costs (of living and of separation) and...

Extending both the “harmful brain drain” literature and the “beneficial brain drain” 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 “harmful brain...

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 negative impact of the brain drain, longer-term...

A new general-equilibrium model that links together rural-to-urban migration, the externality effect of the average level of human capital, and agglomeration economies shows that in developing countries, unrestricted rural-to-urban migration reduces the average income of both rural and urban...

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...