The informational structure of migration decision and migrants’ self-selection

Simone Bertoli

Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa

Abstract: This paper derives the implications for migrants’ self-selection in unobservables that arise from the introduction of uncertainty in the decision problem that would-be migrants face. We show that if one lifts the assumption introduced in Borjas (1987) that foreign wages are known before the migration decision is taken, then the case for the so-called refugee sorting narrows down considerably, while negative selection becomes a more likely outcome. A greater dispersion of income at destination no longer suffices to predict that immigrants will obtain a higher average income than natives.

Keywords: migration; uncertainty; information; self-selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D84 F22 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11 pages
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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Journal Article: The informational structure of migration decision and migrants self-selection (2010)
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