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on Economics of Human Migration |
| By: | Escalante, Luis Enrique; Aragie, Emerta A.; Hernandez, Manuel A. |
| Abstract: | International migration has become a defining force shaping Guatemala’s economy, with both outflows and return inflows generating diverse impacts across economic sectors, labor markets, and household welfare. This study quantifies the economy-wide and distributional impacts of these migration dynamics using a modeling framework that integrates detailed microdata on migration profiles. Three scenarios are considered: a reference case reflecting recent-historical migration patterns (MIG-0), moderately restricted migration (MIG-1), and net return migration (MIG-2), capturing newly emerging shifts in emigration and return flows by skill level within the country. Results reveal trade-offs between aggregate economic performance and distributional impacts across households. Compared to a baseline economy with no mobility, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rises modestly under the reference scenario (+0.2%) and by an additional 0.3-0.5 percentage points under the more restrictive cases, driven by higher labor availability from returnees and currency depreciation. Non-agro-processing manufacturing shows the largest expansion (up to 1.8%), reflecting its strong labor-absorption potential. Household welfare, however, is highly sensitive to remittance flows, with income and consumption declining under the restrictive scenarios. These findings underscore the need for policies that facilitate returnee reintegration and strengthen social protection for remittance-dependent households, ensuring that the macroeconomic gains from migration adjustments translate into equitable welfare improvements. |
| Keywords: | migration; models; econometric models; macroeconomic analysis; labour market; welfare; Guatemala; Latin America |
| Date: | 2025–12–17 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:179008 |
| By: | Nadav Kunievsky |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how age at migration affects cultural assimilation by studying convergence in gender role attitudes between immigrants and the UK-born population. Although cultural values are central to policy debates about integration and social cohesion, most work on migration timing focuses on economic outcomes, leaving effects on values and beliefs far less explored. We address this gap by combining a sibling design with a distributional framework for measuring attitude convergence. Using the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we compare siblings within the same family who arrived in the UK at different ages, exploiting within-family variation to identify the causal effect of childhood exposure to host-country norms. To measure convergence, we compare the full distributions of ordinal survey responses to questions on gender norms for immigrants and locals. Our distance metric is the Total Variation (TV) distance between response distributions. TV has a clear policy-relevant interpretation: it equals the worst-case difference in mean responses over all bounded scoring rules. We then use our estimates to construct two measures of how migration timing changes this distance. The first asks how large the immigrant-UK-born TV distance would be if every immigrant had arrived at birth, and compares it to the observed distance. The second is a marginal measure that asks how the distance changes under a small uniform shift in arrival ages. Our results show that if all immigrants had arrived at birth, the cultural distance between immigrants and locals would decrease substantially, and that marginal increases in migration age incrementally widen this gap. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of early-life exposure in shaping cultural beliefs and provide a robust, broadly applicable framework for quantifying convergence in survey responses. |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2603.23720 |
| By: | Joop Age Harm Adema; Cevat Giray Aksoy; Yvonne Giesing; Panu Poutvaara; Yunus Aksoy |
| Abstract: | Despite rising refugee numbers worldwide, refugees’ return decisions remain poorly understood. Prior work examines either intentions or realized return, but not both. We fielded a ten-wave panel of Ukrainian refugees, linking prewar home municipalities to geocoded conflict and territorial control data and eliciting war expectations. Intentions strongly predict behavior: by 2025, 42% of those planning to return soon in 2022 had returned, versus 1% of those planning to settle abroad. Increasing conflict in the home municipality reduces return there but barely affects return to Ukraine overall. More pessimistic war expectations explain 21% of the decline in return intentions. |
| Keywords: | refugees, return migration, conflict, Ukraine |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12550 |
| By: | Lena von Deylen; Erik Wengström; Philipp Christoph Wichardt |
| Abstract: | This paper reports results from a preregistered survey experiment (ca. 2000) designed to test the connection between economic worries and individual attitudes toward migration and universalism. The experiment was conducted in Germany in February 2025, prior to the general elections, at a time when the German economy had been facing difficulties for some some years. Subjects were assigned to one of four treatments -- one neutral baseline and three setting with varying information about the economy and a question about how threatening the subject's perceive this to be (in general and for them personally). The data show that prompting subjects to reflect on their economic concerns increases migration scepticism and tends to reduce universalism compared to a non-economic control treatment. With respect to the current political polarisation and the rise of (anti-immigrant) populist movements, the findings suggest that reported reservations about migration are likely to be at least partly driven by worries and uncertainties in other domains. |
| Keywords: | economic crisis, anxiety, migration, polarisation, political preferences |
| JEL: | D91 O15 Z10 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12561 |
| By: | Dziadula, Eva; Zavodny, Madeline |
| Abstract: | The educational distribution of U.S. immigrants shifted significantly to the right in recent decades as the share without a high school diploma fell and the share with a bachelor's degree rose. This improvement coincided with a shift in immigrants' origins toward Asia and rising global education levels. This study examines how much of the change in immigrants' educational distribution over 2000-2019 is due to changes in their distribution across origin countries versus rising attainment among immigrants within origin countries. We demonstrate that within-country changes account for most of the observed increase in the educational distribution. In contrast, changes in where immigrants originated played a minimal role. Finally, we show that economic conditions in origin countries can explain little of this rise, whereas demographic trends and the skill composition of U.S. temporary worker visas are significantly related to changes in immigrants' educational distribution. |
| Keywords: | immigration, education, human capital |
| JEL: | I21 J15 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1727 |
| By: | Amare, Mulubrhan; Takeshima, Hiroyuki; Abay, Kibrom A.; Omamo, Steven Were |
| Abstract: | Theoretical models posit that migration decisions are driven by differences in economic opportunities across locations, including across rural and urban areas, which implies that increased rural investment can curb rural-urban migration and encourage engagement in agriculture. However, direct empirical evidence of this remains scant, especially on youth migration in Africa. We fill this knowledge gap by examining the effect of temporal changes in public expenditures for the agriculture sector (PEA) on rural youth’s migration and engagement in rural economies in Nigeria. We combine unique subnational data that capture PEA’s spatiotemporal variations and individual level youth data and estimate two-way fixed effects models. We find that a 1 percentage point increase (equivalent to a 25 percent increase) in the share of PEA, is associated with up to 0.9 percentage points reduction in youth’s out-migration. Conversely, an increase in PEA leads to increased youth engagement in farm activities. Our results suggest that public investments in rural economies can mitigate youth out-migration from rural areas. These results have important implications for informing youth and migration policies, especially in the context of Africa, often characterized by its youth bulge and the exodus of youth from rural areas because of perceived lack of economic opportunities. |
| Keywords: | public expenditure; agriculture; youth; migration; data; models; Nigeria; Western Africa |
| Date: | 2025–11–26 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:ifprid:178300 |
| By: | Zhiguo He; Zehao Liu; Xinle Pang; Yang Su; Kunru Zou |
| Abstract: | Collateral constraints limit household migration to expensive locations by restricting financing for home purchases. Such endogenous location choice amplifies the impact of relaxing household borrowing constraints. Using China’s cash-based shantytown renovation program (2015-2018) as a natural experiment, we provide evidence that cash resettlement—by converting illiquid shanty houses into cash—facilitated household location upgrading and raised house prices in more expensive locations. A dynamic spatial model with collateral constraints confirms household migration responses to the cash transfer. Quantitatively, endogenous migration amplifies household housing expenditure responses by around 40%, and is able to explain more than 20% of the housing price growth in 2016-2020. |
| JEL: | D15 D50 G0 R0 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34982 |
| By: | Aliakbar Akbaritabar (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Andrés F. Castro Torres (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany); Emilio Zagheni (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany) |
| Abstract: | Scientists move internationally in search of opportunities, because of push factors in the origin countries, for family-related, personal, or other reasons. Regardless of what prompts international relocations of researchers, mobility (or lack of it) has macro-level implications for scientific production that are often not fully visible because they have not been quantified. We analyzed bibliometric data on 30+ million publications, indexed by Scopus, and written by 19+ million scholars between 1996 and 2021, to measure the contribution of internationally mobile scholars to scientific production in their country of residence. We found that, across countries, scientific fields, and genders, internationally mobile scholars consistently contribute far more publications than their share of the population of scientists would imply. In advanced economies, mobile scholars account for approximately 20% of all publications, compared to 14--15% in non-advanced economies; in both cases their contribution far exceeds their share of the scholarly population. Smaller countries show a distinct pattern of hosting a larger fraction of scholars with international mobility experience (up to 60%) who are highly productive (in some cases contributing to up to 80% of the publications of the country). Standard bibliometric metrics of national scientific production are analogous to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) accounting: they capture what is produced within a country's borders regardless of who produced it. Our results quantify a dimension invisible in such metrics---the contribution of internationally mobile scholars---and motivate complementary measures of scientific production that account for scholar's country of origin and mobility history. |
| Keywords: | World, computational social science, international migration, migration |
| JEL: | J1 Z0 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2026-009 |
| By: | Dardati, Evangelina; Laurent, Thibault; Margaretic, Paula; Paredes, Ean; Thomas-Agnan, Christine |
| Abstract: | This paper evaluates the role of climate variables in predicting international migration by proposing two alternative modeling approaches: scalar-on-composition and scalar-on-density regressions. We compare them with the standard scalar-on-scalar approach. Although most studies rely on annual averages of daily temperatures, focusing solely on central measures can mask essential details, such as nonlinearities and threshold effects. Using the full temperature distribution, either by binning or smoothing, the proposed models achieve improved predictive performance out-of-sample. These gains highlight the importance of properly handling the compositional nature of daily temperature bin data to avoid misleading interpretation of the estimates and flawed inferences. Finally, we demonstrate how incorporating complete temperature distributions into alternative climate scenarios can substantially affect projected outmigration. |
| Keywords: | compositional data; temperature; migration projections; climate change |
| JEL: | C25 C46 Q54 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tse:wpaper:131610 |
| By: | Alexander Lehner; Giovanni Righetto |
| Abstract: | Brain drain -- the emigration of skilled individuals toward higher-wage economies -- is a well-documented phenomenon, yet its aggregate economic cost remains difficult to quantify because individual productivity is rarely observed. We offer a novel angle on this measurement challenge by studying professional football, a global labour market in which every participant carries a publicly observable, consistently estimated market value. Using data on over 92, 000 professional footballers worldwide from Transfermarkt, we identify nearly 20, 000 players with multi-national eligibility and compute the implied transfer of human capital between countries. We find that the resulting "leg drain" disproportionately benefits wealthy European nations -- France alone gains over EUR3 billion in player value -- while African and Caribbean countries bear the largest losses relative to GDP. Italy is the single largest net loser in absolute terms, driven by the outflow of players with Italian heritage to Latin American national teams. A gravity model of bilateral flows reveals that former colonial ties are among the strongest predictors of leg drain intensity: countries with a colonial relationship to a major European footballing nation lose significantly more player value, even after controlling for population and income. These findings provide a transparent, quantifiable analogue to the broader brain drain debate and highlight how historical institutional links continue to shape global talent redistribution. |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2603.17336 |