Persecution and Migrant Self-Selection: Evidence from the Collapse of the Communist Bloc

Ran Abramitzky, Travis Baseler and Isabelle Sin

No 30204, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: How does persecution affect who migrates? We analyze migrants’ self-selection out of the USSR and its satellite states before and after the collapse of Communism using census microdata from the three largest destination countries: Germany, Israel, and the United States. We find that migrants arriving before and around the time of the collapse (who were more likely to have moved because of persecution) were more educated and had better labor market outcomes in the destination than those arriving later. This change is not fully explained by the removal of emigration restrictions in the Communist Bloc. Instead, we show that this pattern is consistent with more positive self-selection of migrants who are motivated by persecution. When the highly educated disproportionately forgo migrating to enjoy the amenities of their home country, persecution can induce them to leave.

JEL-codes: F22 J6 N30 N32 N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-int, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-ure
Note: DAE LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30204.pdf (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:nbr:nberwo:30204

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30204

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().