Revisiting the Migration-Development Nexus: A Gravity Model Approach

Emmanuel Letouzé, Mark Purser, Francisco Rodríguez and Matthew Cummins

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper presents empirical estimates of a gravity model of bilateral migration that properly accounts for non-linearities and tackles causality issues through an instrumental variables approach. In contrast to the existing literature, which is limited to OECD data, we have estimated our model using a matrix of bilateral migration stocks for 127 countries. We find that the inverted-U relationship between income at origin and migration found by other authors survives the more demanding bilateral specification but does not survive both instrumentation and introduction of controls for the geographical and cultural proximity between country pairs. We also evaluate the effect of migration on origin and destination country income using the geographically determined component of migration as a source of exogenous variation and fail to find a significant effect of migration on origin or destination income.

Keywords: Gravity models; international migration; economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F16 F22 O15 O19 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/19227/1/MPRA_paper_19227.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Revisiting the Migration-Development Nexus: A Gravity Model Approach (2009)
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:pra:mprapa:19227

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().