Income and Migration: Evidence from a Century of Windfall Income Shocks (with Erik Haustein)
This article studies the effect of windfall income shocks on emigration, conditionally on economic development. The theory of relative income differences between countries assumes that migration decreases with economic development. A growing literature, however, supports the existence of a mobility transition, promoting an inverse U-shaped relationship between income and migration. We provide novel empirical evidence by exploiting the Spanish national Christmas lottery as a natural experiment to study the effect of windfall income on local emigration from 1877 to 1970. We find that a positive income shock increases international emigration for relatively poor regions within Spain, but not for the most economically developed regions. The results suggest that a windfall income shock may be a way to alleviate the financial constraints associated with pre-funding migration costs. Our findings add to the literature on the causes of migration by adding a microfounded but long-run perspective.
Real Iceberg Transport Costs: The Distance Effect of the North Atlantic Iceberg Drift on Trade (with Christian Düben and Jonas F. Rudsinske)
Is Davos More Than a Boondoggle? (with Andreas Fuchs and Andrew K. Rose)
The Impact of Sea Rescue on Irregular Migration (with Sarah Langlotz and Paul Michel)
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