Theme

People

Questions

Where do people move, and where do they end up?

Migrant stock, net migration and displacement — and why a stock is not a flow.

Which economies run on money sent home?

Remittances received as a share of GDP, against the aid and investment they are often compared to.

Does money earned abroad build anything lasting at home?

Khanna, Murathanoglu, Theoharides and Yang use the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which moved exchange rates differently for...

Gaurav Khanna et al. (2026) · Review of Economic Studies

What happens when the arrivals are near-perfect substitutes for the workers already there?

Braun and Mahmoud use the same expellee episode for a different question. Because expellees were ethnic Germans, not selected...

Sebastian Braun, Toman Omar Mahmoud (2014) · Journal of Economic History 74(1)

If you shut a border to protect domestic workers, do their wages actually rise?

Clemens, Lewis and Postel study the 1964 exclusion of nearly half a million Mexican bracero farm workers from the United...

Michael A. Clemens, Ethan G. Lewis, Hannah M. Postel (2018) · American Economic Review 108(6)

If firms cannot hire foreign workers for low-skill jobs, do they hire local ones instead?

Clemens and Lewis exploit the randomised lottery that allocates part of the US H-2B visa quota — as clean an experiment as...

Michael A. Clemens, Ethan G. Lewis (2026) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

How long does a labour market take to absorb a very large, sudden arrival?

Braun and Weber study the arrival of eight million German expellees in West Germany after 1945, distributed very unevenly...

Sebastian Till Braun, Henning Weber (2021) · Journal of International Economics

Does money sent home protect households from bad years, or add another source of instability?

Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo examine Mexican household data from 2000 to 2008, correcting for the reverse causality that makes...

Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Susan Pozo (2011) · American Economic Review 101(3)

Do people who flee do as well in a new labour market as people who choose to move?

Brell, Dustmann and Preston survey refugee labour-market outcomes across high-income countries and find refugees do...

Courtney Brell, Christian Dustmann, Ian Preston (2020) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 34(1)

When seven million people arrive at once, who gains and who loses?

Caliendo, Opromolla, Parro and Sforza treat the arrival of more than seven million Ukrainian refugees after the 2022 invasion...

Lorenzo Caliendo et al. (2023) · AEA Papers and Proceedings

Why has the wage gap between immigrants and natives widened for each successive arrival cohort?

Albert, Glitz and Llull show that immigrant wage assimilation depends not only on individual skill accumulation but on labour...

Christoph Albert, Albrecht Glitz, Joan Llull (2026) · American Economic Review

Does a hotter year send people abroad, and does it matter whether they have relatives already there?

Ibáñez, Quigua, Romero and Velásquez show that exposure to extreme temperatures raises international migration from El...

Ana María Ibáñez et al. (2026) · Journal of Development Economics

How much of what migrants send home does anybody actually observe?

De Arcangelis, Fertig, Liang, Srouji and Yang tackle the measurement problem directly, comparing survey responses against...

Giuseppe De Arcangelis et al. (2022) · Journal of Development Economics

If cities pay so much more, why do so few people move to them?

Baseler runs two field experiments in Kenya and finds part of the answer is that rural households do not know how much...

Travis Baseler (2023) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 15(4)

Datasets

ILO