Sustainable Migration Policies

Pierre Picard and Timothy Worrall

No 1122, Economics Discussion Paper Series from Economics, The University of Manchester

Abstract: This paper considers whether countries might mutually agree a policy of open borders, allowing free movement of workers across countries. For the countries to agree, the short run costs must outweighed by the long term benefits that result from better labour market flexibility and income smoothing. We show that such policies are less likely to be adopted when workers are less risk averse workers and when countries trade more. More surprisingly, we find that some congestion costs can help. This reverses the conventional wisdom that congestion costs tend to inhibit free migration policies.

Keywords: Migration; Self-enforcing mechanism; Repeated games. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J61 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2011-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig
Note: The second author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Hallsworth Research Fellowship Fund at the University of Manchester.
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/schools/soss/eco ... npapers/EDP-1122.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Sustainable migration policies (2011)
Working Paper: Sustainable Migration Policies (2010)
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:man:sespap:1122

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion Paper Series from Economics, The University of Manchester Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Patrick Macnamara ().