On the Economic Geography of International Migration

Caglar Ozden () and Christopher Parsons
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Caglar Ozden: World Bank

No 8747, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We exploit the bilateral and skill dimensions from recent data sets of international migration to test for the existence of Zipf's and Gibrat's Laws in the context of aggregate and high-skilled international immigration and emigration using graphical, parametric and non-parametric analysis. The top tails of the distributions of aggregate and high-skilled immigrants and emigrants adhere to a Pareto distribution with an exponent of unity i.e. Zipf's Law holds. We find some evidence in favour of Gibrat's Law holding for immigration stocks, i.e. that the growth in stocks is independent of their initial values and stronger evidence that immigration densities are diverging over time. Conversely, emigrant stocks are converging in the sense that countries with smaller emigrant stocks are growing faster than their larger sovereign counterparts. Lastly, high skilled immigration and emigration stocks expressed in levels or as densities all exhibit signs of convergence. We conclude by discussing some competing mechanisms that could be driving the observed patterns including: differing fertility rates, reductions in emigration restrictions, migrant sorting and selective immigration policies, immigrant networks and persisting wage differentials.

Keywords: international migration; Gibrat's Law; Zipf's Law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J61 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2014-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-int, nep-mig and nep-ure
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Published - published in World Economy 2015, 39 (4), 478–495

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Journal Article: On the Economic Geography of International Migration (2016)
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