Migration has a strong economic impact on the sending and host countries. Since individuals and groups do not benefit equally from migration, interest groups emerge to protect and take care of their narrow self-interests and compete for rents generated by migration. Narrow self-interests may be...

The design of optimal immigration policy, particularly in the face of the spiralling demand for highly skilled workers, such as IT workers and engineers, is a topical issue in the policy debate as well as the economic literature. In this paper, we present empirical evidence from firm level data...

International donors usually have particular goals they want to achieve with their foreign aid, for example, poverty alleviation. In the international aid story lobbying by potential recipient groups attempting to capture the donor's support play a potentially important role for nongovernmental...

This paper examines the connection between illegal migration, minimum wages and enforcement policy. We first explore the employers' decision regarding the employment of illegal migrants in the presence of an effective minimum wage. We show that the employers' decision depends on the wage gap...

We model the aid allocation decision where the donor government has announced that good governance is the criterion for receiving aid. Potential recipients must compete for the aid funds. The structure of the competition is important to the donor in terms of achieving good governance, and to the...

This paper analyses the decentralization of decisionmaking in aid-giving in a theoretical rent-seeking framework. In this analysis the root donor establishes a necessary criterion for potential recipients: good governance. The potential recipients compete in hierarchal contests for funds. The...