Crossing the Border: Self-selection, Earnings and Individual Migration Decisions

Many empirical studies on the determinants of international migration flows rely exclusively on macro data, and do not account for migrants' self-selection. We analyze a very interesting episode in international migration for which we are able to gather individual-level data covering all relevant countries, namely the exodus of Ecuadorians to Spain and the US in the aftermath of the economic collapse of 1999. Specifically, we produce selectioncorrected predictions of counterfactual individual earnings and use them to estimate a discrete-choice migration equation that allows for correlated errors across destinations and a rich structure of migration costs. We find that earnings significantly shape individual migration decisions, even in an episode in which Ecuadorians mostly chose Spain where earnings were lower than in the US, and they contribute to explaining the observed composition of migration flows. Moreover, our estimates show that changes in earnings at a particular destination have a larger effect on destination choice conditional on migration than on the scale of migration.international migration, self-selection, earnings, individual-level data

Recovering the counterfactual wage distribution with selective return migration

This paper recovers the distribution of wages for Mexican-born workers living in the U.S. if no return migration of Mexican-born workers occurred. Because migrants self-select in the decision to return, the overarching problem addressed by this study is the use of an estimator that also accounts for selection on unobservables. I find that Mexican returnees are middle- to high-wage earners at all levels of educational attainment. Taking into account self-selection in return migration, wages would be approximately 7.7% higher at the median and 4.5% higher at the mean. Owing to positive self-selection, the immigrant-native wage gap would, therefore, partially close if there was no return migration

Multilateral resistance to migration

The rate of migration observed between two countries does not depend solely on their relative attractiveness, but also on the one of alternative destinations. Following the trade literature, we term the influence exerted by other destinations on bilateral flows as Multilateral Resistance to Migration, and we show how it can be accounted for when estimating the determinants of migration flows in the context of a general individual random utility maximization model. We propose the use of the Common Correlated Effects estimator (Pesaran, 2006) and apply it to high-frequency data on the Spanish immigration boom between 1997 and 2009. Compared to more restrictive estimation strategies developed in the literature, the bias goes in the expected direction: we find a smaller effect of GDP per capita and a larger effect of migration policies on bilateral flows

Combining Physical and Financial Solidarity in Asylum Policy

International audienc

Tradable Refugee-Admission Quotas, Matching and the New European Agenda for Migration

International audienc

Rational inattention and migration decisions

International audienceAcquiring information about destinations can be costly for migrants. We model information frictions in the rational inattention framework and obtain a closed-form expression for a migration gravity equation that we bring to the data. The model predicts that flows from countries with a higher cost of information or stronger priors are less responsive to variations in economic conditions in the various destinations, as migrants rationally get less information before deciding where to move. The economet-ric analysis reveals systematic heterogeneity in the pro-cyclical behavior of migration flows across origins that is consistent with the existence of information frictions