Are migrant minorities strategically self-selected?

In this paper we focus on the possibility of migrants' self-selection through strategic remittances. We argue that migrants of a specific community might be pooled with migrants from other ethnic minorities on the labor market of the foreign host country and that this could reduce the occurrence of strategic remittances. In a simple model with two types of workers, skilled and unskilled, facing two possible actions, to migrate or not to migrate, we derive the theoretical conditions under which strategic transfers are still operating when pooling among communities is introduced. We then show through numerical illustrations that the case for strategic transfers is rather weak when using realistic values for the main parameters of the model. Received: 1 October 1997/Accepted: 7 April 1998     

Comparing Immigration Policies: An Overview from the IMPALA Database

This paper introduces a method and preliminary findings from a database that systematically measures the character and stringency of immigration policies. Based on the selection of that data for nine countries between 1999 and 2008, we challenge the idea that any one country is systematically the most or least restrictive toward admissions. The data also reveal trends toward more complex and, often, more restrictive regulation since the 1990s, as well as differential treatment of groups, such as lower requirements for highly skilled than low‐skilled labor migrants. These patterns illustrate the IMPALA data and methods but are also of intrinsic importance to understanding immigration regulation.     

A network ridesharing experiment with sequential choice of transportation mode

Within the last decade, there has been a dramatic bloom in ridesharing businesses along with the emergence of new enabling technologies. A central issue in ridesharing, which is also important in the general domain of cost-sharing in economics and computer science, is that the sharing of cost implies positive externalities and hence coordination problems for the network users. We investigate these problems experimentally in the present study. In particular, we focus on how sequential observability of transportation mode choices can be a powerful facilitator of coordination in ridesharing. Our study abstracts the essential issues of coordination in ridesharing into a directed network game with experimentally testable predictions. In line with the theoretical analysis, our experimental evidence shows that even a limited extent of sequential choice observability might lead to efficient coordination. However, convergence to efficiency is slower with more limited observability, resulting in a significant increase in travel cost.