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The Effects of Education, Parental Background and Ethnic Concentration on Language

Temporary Migration, Human Capital, and Language Fluency of Migrants

This paper investigates human capital investment of immigrants whose duration in the host country is limited, either by contract or by their own choice. The first part of the paper develops a model which distinguishes between temporary migrations where the return time is exogenous or optimally chosen. The analysis has a number of interesting implications for empirical work, some of which are explored ...

Children and return migration

Return Migration, Wage Differentials, and the Optimal Migration Duration

In simple static models, migration increases with the wage differential between host- and home-country. In a dynamic framework, and if migrations are temporary, the size of the migrant population in the host country depends also on the migration duration. This paper analyses optimal migration durations in a model which rationalises the decision of the migrant to return to his home country, despite ...

Parental background, secondary school track choice, and wages

The way parents take influence on the education of their children is a crucial aspect of intergenerational mobility. Unlike in the UK or in the US, in Germany an important decision about which educational track to follow is made at a relatively early stage: after primary school, at the age of ten. In this paper, we use micro data to analyse the association between parents’ education and profession, ...

Return Migration, Investment in Children, and Intergenerational Mobility: Comparing Sons of Foreign- and Native-Born Fathers

This paper studies parental investment in education and intergenerational earnings mobility for father-son pairs with native- and foreign-born fathers. We illustrate within a simple model that for immigrants, investment in their children is related to their return migration probability. In our empirical analysis, we include a measure for return probabilities, based on repeated information about migrants’ ...

Housing Expenditures and Income Inequality

In this paper, we show that, in terms of real disposable income, changes in housing expenditures dramatically exacerbate the trend of income inequality that has risen sharply in Germany since the mid-1990s. More specifically, whereas the 50/10 ratio of net household income increases by 22 percentage points (pp) between 1993 and 2013, it increases by 62 pp for income net of housing expenditures. At ...

The Economics of Temporary Migrations

Many migrations are temporary -- a fact that has often been ignored in the economic literature on migration. Such omission may be serious in that expected migration temporariness can impart a distinct dynamic element to immigrants' economic behavior, generating possible consequences for nonmigrants in both home and host countries. In this paper, we provide a thorough examination of the various ...

Revisiting the German Wage Structure

This paper shows that wage inequality in West Germany has increased over the past three decades, contrary to common perceptions. During the 1980s, the increase was concentrated at the top of the distribution; in the 1990s, it occurred at the bottom end as well. Our findings are consistent with the view that both in Germany and in the United States, technological change is responsible for the widening ...

Remittances and Temporary Migration