The macroeconomic determinants of migration

John Lewis and Matt Swannell ()
Additional contact information
Matt Swannell: Bank of England, Postal: Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH

No 729, Bank of England working papers from Bank of England

Abstract: We estimate a gravity model of the determinants of migration flows using pairwise data from around 160 origin countries to 35 advanced economy destinations over the period 1990–2013. When we interact the various explanatory variables with freedom of movement we find that the elasticities of migration with respect to macroeconomic variables are not constant across country pairs. Under freedom of movement, the response to macroeconomic variables is stronger, and the response to distance and historical migrant stocks is weaker. However, the elasticity with regard to linguistic and historical variables does remain constant. Alongside macro variables commonly used in the literature, we also find a significant role for expected GDP growth. Migration flows are higher to destinations with stronger expected GDP growth, and from origins with weaker expected GDP growth. In addition, greater labour market flexibility in destination countries is associated with higher inward migration.

Keywords: Migration; macroeconomics; common correlated effects; multilateral resistance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 E00 F22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2018-05-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int, nep-mac and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/ ... C8906FD7F7F69AF78484 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boe:boeewp:0729

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bank of England working papers from Bank of England Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Digital Media Team ().