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on Economics of Human Migration |
| By: | Katia Gallegos Torres; Andreas Steinmayr; Valentin Wett |
| Abstract: | This paper studies how local labor market tightness and welfare benefit levels at the time of receiving protection shape refugees' labor market integration and location choices. We exploit a sequence of reforms that generated quasi-random variation in benefit levels, together with variation in local labor market tightness across the districts and months in which refugees receive protection. We find that tighter local labor markets raise employment, while more generous benefits slightly reduce it. These employment effects persist for about 2.5 years, but both shocks have lasting impacts on internal migration. Moreover, the negative employment effect of benefits is larger in tighter labor markets. Neither shock affects the probability of emigrating from Austria. |
| Keywords: | Immigrant integration, refugees, welfare benefits, labor demand |
| JEL: | F22 J31 J61 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26232 |
| By: | Pineda-Hernández, Kevin; Rycx, François; Volral, Mélanie |
| Abstract: | Although an increasing body of literature has examined the relationship between firms' profitability and wage inequality in the context of a diverse workforce, the role of rent sharing in explaining origin-based wage differentials has yet to be explored. Our paper aims to fill this gap using detailed Belgian matched employer-employee data from 1999 to 2016. After controlling for a wide range of covariates and addressing endogeneity issues, our estimates show that the wage-profit elasticity equals approximately 3% and does not differ statistically between native and immigrant workers, be they first or second generation. It therefore appears that firms share their profits equally with their employees, regardless of their origin. However, Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions suggest that rent sharing has a significant influence on immigrants' wages through labour market segregation. Specifically, first-generation immigrants are found to earn lower wages than natives because of their higher concentration in firms with lower profit margins. The same is true for second-generation immigrants, but almost half as much. These findings, corroborated and refined by heterogeneity tests according to gender, educational attainment and level of collective bargaining, support the hypothesis of a segmented assimilation process for immigrants. |
| Keywords: | Rent sharing, natives, first- and second-generation immigrants, matched employer-employee data, wage decompositions, instrumental variables |
| JEL: | C26 J15 J16 J31 J61 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1830 |
| By: | Keisuke Kondo (Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry and Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University, JAPAN) |
| Abstract: | This study examines how multiple agglomeration and dispersion forces shaped Mexico’s regional economic geography during the early post-NAFTA period. When economic activity becomes geographically concentrated, consumers gain better access to differentiated varieties and face lower effective transport costs, reducing the local consumption price index and making a region more attractive as a migration destination. Building on this price-index mechanism from New Economic Geography, we focus on four spatial forces: proximity to the U.S. market, the manufacturing price-index effect, the service price-index effect, and density-related urban costs. Using bilateral interstate migration between 1995 and 2000, we proceed in two stages. First, we estimate the structural parameters of the model and recover state-level price indices for manufactured goods and services. Second, we examine how destination–origin differences in nominal wages, price indices, and urban costs are associated with migration across sectors, while controlling for the additional locational advantage of U.S. border states. The manufacturing price index is strongly and negatively associated with migration of manufacturing workers, whereas its cross-sector effects are more limited. By contrast, the service price index is negatively and significantly associated with migration across all sectors, indicating a broad domestic agglomeration force. Employment density is generally negatively associated with migration, consistent with urban costs acting as a centrifugal force, while real-wage differentials are positively associated with migration across most industries. Taken together, the findings suggest that post-NAFTA Mexico was shaped by the interaction of border-oriented manufacturing agglomeration, domestic service-sector agglomeration, and urban-cost-driven dispersion. |
| Keywords: | Migration; Supplier access; Price index; Real wage; Agglomeration |
| JEL: | J61 O15 R12 R23 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kob:dpaper:dp2026-27 |
| By: | Akbulut-Yuksel, Mevlude (Dalhousie University); Aydemir, Abdurrahman (Sabanci University); Kirdar, Murat (Koc University); Turan, Belgi (TOBB University of Economics and Technology) |
| Abstract: | We ask whether cultural constraints are a development bottleneck in conservative middle-income economies, limiting women's entry into manufacturing and slowing fertility decline and human-capital accumulation. We exploit the 1989 forced migration of ethnic Turks from Bulgaria to Turkiye. Refugee women shared native women's language, religion, and ethnicity but had much higher employment, especially in manufacturing. We combine difference-in-differences with an instrument based on where the state settled earlier ethnic Turkish migrants. Exposure to refugee women raised native women's participation and employment a decade later, especially in male-dominated tradable manufacturing. Native men saw no significant gains. A one-percentage-point higher refugee-to-native ratio raises native women's manufacturing employment by 0.9 percentage points, about 23 percent of the 1990 mean. Exposure reduced fertility and raised middle-school completion among native girls and boys. The results suggest that an exogenous cultural shock relaxed a binding constraint on women's modern-sector entry, a margin central to structural transformation and demographic transition. Intermarriage and World Values Survey evidence is consistent with this view. |
| Keywords: | structural transformation, demographic transition, cultural barriers, refugees, women's employment, manufacturing |
| JEL: | J16 J13 O11 O14 R23 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18983 |
| By: | Yannis Kastis; Hillary Vipond |
| Abstract: | This paper studies how the organization of production shapes the adoption of new technologies. We examine a shift in production organization in English tailoring induced by the arrival of Jewish tailors fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1905. When Jewish immigrant tailors arrived in England, native tailors were mostly self-employed and used sewing machines, introduced in the 1860s, to raise individual productivity. In Russia, where sewing machines were largely unavailable to them, Jewish tailors worked in ready-to-wear production, which involved a modular approach and greater collaboration within workshops. Upon arriving in England, they combined the sewing machines with their organizational practice to introduce the so-called "Jewish task system", which relied on an extensive division of labor and enabled clothing production to scale. Combining original data on production tasks with firm-level data, and using immigrant settlement patterns predating the introduction of the sewing machine as an instrument, we show that immigrant arrivals induced native tailors to reorganize production toward this system, accelerating both the diffusion of the sewing machine and England's transition to mass-produced clothing. Our findings show that organizing production efficiently around a new technology is a prerequisite for its diffusion. |
| Keywords: | organization of production, technology adoption, immigration |
| JEL: | L23 O33 J61 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26253 |
| By: | la Cour, Lisbeth (Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School); Kruse-Becher, Sanne (Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University Stuttgart); Larsen, Birthe (Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School); Jepsen Mejlgaard, Martin (Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School) |
| Abstract: | Wars generate economic costs beyond conflict zones through diaspora networks. We examine how war onset in immigrants’ countries of origin affects mental health in Denmark using nationwide administrative registers and a within-individual event-study design. Psychotropic medication use rises persistently following war onset, particularly among non-citizens, parents, and individuals with a same-origin spouse, but only when conflicts persist. Higher local co-ethnic concentration attenuates these effects. We further show that war onset increases publicly financed pharmaceutical expenditure, implying measurable fiscal costs for immigrant receiving countries. These findings reveal important cross-border welfare spillovers of armed conflict. |
| Keywords: | International migration; War; Mental health |
| JEL: | F22 F51 I10 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:cbsnow:2026_012 |
| By: | Michel Beine; Giovanni Peri; Morgan Raux; Lilie Timricht |
| Abstract: | We provide the first global empirical evidence on the relationship between international master’s education and entrepreneurship. Using large-scale longitudinal data from LinkedIn/Revelio, we document that international master’s graduates are systematically more likely than domestic graduates to create firms across the world’s leading destinations for international students. We further show how this entrepreneurial advantage varies across fields of study, gender, origin and destination countries. In addition, we document the geography of post-graduation firm creation, highlighting the international mobility of entrepreneurial activity among former international students. Taken together, the results offer a new global perspective on the economic impact of international student mobility and the contribution of international master’s graduates to entrepreneurship, innovation, and business dynamism worldwide. |
| Keywords: | foreign students, entrepreneurship, master’s programs, STEM |
| JEL: | F22 I23 M13 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13014 |
| By: | Caterina Pavese; Simon ter Meulen; Ludger Woessmann |
| Abstract: | Does direct integration into native schools or temporary placement in separate schools better promote the education and cultural assimilation of refugee children? In the Netherlands, primary-school-aged refugee children are placed in either integrated or separated schools depending on their randomly assigned municipality. By contrast, all secondary-school-aged arrivals are initially separated. We exploit this institutional setting in two-way fixed-effects models with age-at-arrival and municipality fixed effects. Using rich administrative data, we find that integrated schooling reduces educational attainment at age 18, particularly for children of lower-educated parents. At the same time, integrated schooling increases cultural assimilation, measured by hormonal-contraceptive usage among teenage women, particularly for children from non-Muslim-majority countries. A distinctive feature of separated schooling that may account for its positive educational effect is that it allows employing teachers specialized in native-language teaching for non-native speakers. |
| Keywords: | refugee children, schools, integration, educational attainment, contraceptives |
| JEL: | I24 I21 J13 J15 O15 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13023 |
| By: | Christopher A. Hartwell |
| Abstract: | Organizations may perceive disorder in their environment as a threat which can impede the attainment of desired goals. In such a situation, organizations may become single minded, obsessed, and rely on brute force to attempt to bend the external environment to their will. These efforts may be enabled by perceived power imbalances between the organization and other actors in the environment, but they may also be stymied by the complexity of other organizations in the institutional field. This paper examines such an example in Soviet Kazakhstan from 1929 to 1933, when the All Union Communist Party pursued a policy of sedentarization of the nomadic people. Forcibly migrating nomads to collective farms under a brutal policy of repression, the Soviet bureaucracy at all levels saw no policy as off-limits to achieving its goals but continued to run up against resistance from the complex organizational forms inherent in Kazakh nomadism. Using archival documents, testimonies from Kazakhs, and arrest records from this time period, I show just exactly how the Soviet apparatus pulled the devil from the machine and how, ultimately, the machines were doomed to failure. However, the human cost of forced migration continues to linger. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.31916 |
| By: | Nora Paulus (DF, Université du Luxembourg); Giuseppe Pulina (DEM, Université du Luxembourg); Patrice Pieretti (DEM, Université du Luxembourg); Benteng Zou (DEM, Université du Luxembourg) |
| Abstract: | "We analyze how lower barriers to labor mobility affect tax competition, labor allocation, wages, public revenues, and welfare in a two-country model. Govern- ments compete for mobile workers through labor income taxation, and national welfare is evaluated on a residence basis, including the mobility burden borne by migrants. Greater mobility intensifies tax competition, raises workers’ net wages in both countries, and reallocates labor and output toward the advanced economy. As a result, global welfare rises, while national welfare increases in the advanced coun- try and decreases in the lagging country. Because the advanced country’s welfare gain exceeds the lagging country’s welfare loss, there is sufficient aggregate welfare to make both countries better off through compensation. This possibility does not, however, imply that such a transfer is fiscally feasible. Since mobility reduces tax revenues in both countries, the required compensation cannot be financed from additional fiscal resources generated by liberalization. Labor-market integration is therefore welfare-feasible but not fiscally self-financing. Its implementation thus requires broader fiscal coordination or external funding." |
| Keywords: | "international labor mobility; tax competition; national welfare; compensating transfers; fiscal coordination." |
| JEL: | F22 H54 H87 J61 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:luc:wpaper:26-13 |