Spillovers and strategic interaction in immigration policies

Joseph-Simon Görlach and Nicolas Motz

Journal of Economic Geography, 2021, vol. 21, issue 2, 287-315

Abstract: Asylum policies are interdependent across countries: policy choices in one country can affect refugee flows into neighbouring countries and may provoke policy changes there, in an a priori unknown direction. We formulate a dynamic model of refugees’ location choices and of the strategic interaction among destinations that we fit to Syrian refugee migration to Europe. We find that south and southeastern European countries view recognition rates as strategic substitutes, whereas the same policies can be strategic complements in northern Europe. Our findings imply that regression frameworks which use cross-country variation to estimate the effects of recognition rates on immigration underestimate (overestimate) the effect if this policy is a strategic substitute (complement).

Keywords: Policy spillovers; policy equilibrium; migration; asylum policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 F22 J15 K37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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