Toward a Common Market in Residency: International Migration and Regional Integration

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Author: Lee Biernbaum

Adviser: Peter Mueser

Economics, MA
SS 2005

 

Public Abstract: This paper seeks to develop models of international regional migration, particularly in continents undergoing economic and political integration. As the borders between nations become more permeable, the implications of immigrant behavior will become increasingly important to economists and policy-makers. I outline the history of migration research, focusing on development of the gravity model and some of the most important variables used in previous studies. From there, I develop six models to look at the impact of macroeconomics, international organization memberships, common languages, measures of communication and technology, and policy on migration flows and stocks in Europe and South America. In order to determine the effect of changes in these variables, as well as to account for systematic bias that results from the nature of the dataset, I use Fixed Effects and Tobit models, as well as traditional OLS analysis. I find significant effects in expected directions from the traditional model elements. Organization membership generally encourages migration. Common spoken, rather than official, languages, exhibit large significance and have been generally ignored in previous research. Measures of technology and communication seem to affect source countries more than destinations, and have a significant and collectively important effect on migration. Immigration policy significantly affects migration patterns but is plagued with questions of causality and further research is needed. A combination model is then fitted and it performs well enough with European data to be of possible use to policy makers.