European Migration Policies: the Effect of Uncertainty
Michele Moretto and
Sergio Vergalli
Review of Environment, Energy and Economics - Re3, 2012
Abstract:
In our article we study how uncertainty affects migration choice and how networks are able to mitigate its effects. In particular, we describe a real option model where the migration choice depends on both the wage differential between the host country and the country of origin, and on a network of homogeneous immigrants. By looking at the labour market uncertainty, the optimal migration decision of an individual consists of waiting to migrate in a (coordinated) mass of individuals. By looking at policy uncertainty, we try to explain if it is better for the government to tighten or relax limits for immigrants in order to control migration inflows. Our results show that promoting uncertainty over migration limit may improve the government's control on migration inflows (quotas). In particular, we show that if the government controls the information related to the immigration stock it could delay the mass entry of immigrants, maintaining the required stock in the long run and controlling the flows in the short-run. Therefore, if the government's aim is to delay and/or control entry migration waves, it could control the uncertainty on the information related to the immigration quota.
Keywords: Immigration; Real Option; Quota (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J2 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://re3.feem.it/getpage.aspx?id=4894 (text/html)
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:fem:femre3:2012.06-02
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Review of Environment, Energy and Economics - Re3 from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alberto Prina Cerai ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).