Governments do not have perfect information regarding constituent priorities and needs. This lack of knowledge opens the door for groups to lobby in order to affect the government’s taxation levels. We examine the political economy of decentralized revenue-raising authority in light of social...

Governments do not have perfect information regarding constituent priorities and needs. This lack of knowledge opens the door for groups to lobby in order to affect the government's taxation levels. We examine the political economy of decentralized revenue-raising authority in light of social...

In this paper, we present a formal framework of possible network formations among immigrants. After arriving in the new country, one of the new immigrant’s important decisions is with whom to maintain a link in the foreign country. We find that the behavior of the first two immigrants affects...

The social contract of the welfare state can be strained by the arrival of immigrants who receive welfare payments financed by citizens' taxes. We show, however, that the presence of unemployed immigrants receiving welfare payments is consistent with social harmony. The social harmony, which is...

This paper looks at the situation of legal immigrants who employ illegal immigrants to provide them with various services. This enables the legal immigrants to allocate more time to other work, thereby increasing their earnings. Illegal immigrants employed by legal immigrants may specialize in...

We present a basic theoretical framework of ethnic identity, i.e., the level of immigrant's commitment to his or her host society as well as the immigrant's commitment to his or her home society. Our model can explain the emerging empirical literature which studies the effect of the immigrants'...

The literature, starting with Chiswick (1977, 1978) to Gang and Zimmermann (2000), more recently, focuses on the economic achievements and performance of first- and secondgeneration migrants. This paper presents a three-generation migrant analysis, comparing relative economic performance of...

Recently, Constant, Gataullina, and Zimmermann (2009) established a new method to measure ethnic identity which they called the "ethnosizer". Using information on an individual's language, culture, social interactions, history of migration, and ethnic selfidentification, the method classifies...

In this paper we examine possible network formations among immigrants and natives with endogenous investment. We consider a model of a network formation where the initiator of the link bears its cost while both agents benefit from it. We present the model by considering possible interactions...

Within immigrant society different groups wish to help the migrants in different ways – immigrant societies are multi-layered and multi-dimensional. We examine the situation where there exists a foundation that has resources and that wishes to help the migrants. To do so they need migrant...