Industrial Management
The age of mass migration from Europe to the New World was one of the largest in history. Between 1850 and 1913, the United States absorbed nearly 30 million European immigrants. With the advanced technology that took place during that period, the declining cost of migration together with the rising real income relaxed the financial constraints, which shifted the migrant flow from richer to the poorer. However, beyond these broad macro patterns, we know very little about the characteristics of individuals who chose to leave Europe.
So what is the motivation behind? It’s very important to study extensively about migration during the era. US maintained a nearly open border back then, allowing the study of self-selection and the economic return to migration without the interference from the legal factors. Today’s---not only individual choice, but also of complicated entry rules, obscure the true economic forces.
There are previous literatures on migrant selection and here are the two very basic models. 1) Roy Model, Roy paper discusses the optimizing choices of ‘workers’ selecting between fishing and hunting. The main idea here is that workers have skills in each occupation, but they can only use one or the other. Hence, workers self-select the sector that gives them the highest expected earnings.
2) Borjas’ paper modified the Roy model of occupational choice to generate predictions about the nature of migrant selection. In his framework, migrant selection is determined by the relative return to skill in the sending and destination economies, which means that if the destination country exhibits higher return to skill than the source country, therefore, greater levels of income inequality, migrants will be drawn disproportionately from the top end of its distribution.
Nevertheless, current work on immigrants flow has found only mixed support for his model. For example, one of them shows Mexican migrants to the US are drawn from the middle, rather than the
So what is the motivation behind? It’s very important to study extensively about migration during the era. US maintained a nearly open border back then, allowing the study of self-selection and the economic return to migration without the interference from the legal factors. Today’s---not only individual choice, but also of complicated entry rules, obscure the true economic forces.
There are previous literatures on migrant selection and here are the two very basic models. 1) Roy Model, Roy paper discusses the optimizing choices of ‘workers’ selecting between fishing and hunting. The main idea here is that workers have skills in each occupation, but they can only use one or the other. Hence, workers self-select the sector that gives them the highest expected earnings.
2) Borjas’ paper modified the Roy model of occupational choice to generate predictions about the nature of migrant selection. In his framework, migrant selection is determined by the relative return to skill in the sending and destination economies, which means that if the destination country exhibits higher return to skill than the source country, therefore, greater levels of income inequality, migrants will be drawn disproportionately from the top end of its distribution.
Nevertheless, current work on immigrants flow has found only mixed support for his model. For example, one of them shows Mexican migrants to the US are drawn from the middle, rather than the