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Dissecting network externalities in international migration

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Beine, Michel [University of Luxembourg] Docquier, Frédéric [UCL] Özden, Çağlar [World Bank]

Migrant networks play an important role in explaining the size and structure of migration flows. They affect the private costs and benefits of migration (assimilation channel) and lower legal entry barriers through family reunification programs (policy channel). This paper presents a micro-founded identification strategy allowing to disentangle the relative importance of these two channels. Our empirical analysis exploits US immigration data by metropolitan area and country of origin. We first find that the elasticity of migration flows to network size is around one. More interestingly, we show that the policy channel accounted at most for a quarter of this elasticity in the 1990s, and the magnitudes of the total network effect and the policy channel are greater for low-skilled migrants. Our results are strongly robust to sample selection, identification assumptions, and treatment for unobserved bilateral heterogeneity. Furthermore, the policy channel was stronger in the 1990s than in the 1980s, possibly reflecting the changes in the US family reunification policies. We conclude that the government capacity to curb the migration multiplier exists, but is limited.

Document type Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche
Access type Accès restreint
Publication date 2015
Language Anglais
Journal information "Journal of Demographic Economics" - Vol. 81, no.4, p. 379-408 (December 2015)
Peer reviewed yes
Publisher Cambridge University Press ((United Kingdom) Cambridge)
issn 2054-0892
Publication status Publié
Affiliation UCL - SSH/LIDAM/IRES - Institut de recherches économiques et sociales
Keywords Migration ; Networks/diaspora externalities ; Immigration policy
Links
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Bibliographic reference Beine, Michel ; Docquier, Frédéric ; Özden, Çağlar. Dissecting network externalities in international migration. In: Journal of Demographic Economics, Vol. 81, no.4, p. 379-408 (December 2015)
Permanent URL http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/172238