IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fem/femre3/2012.06-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

European Migration Policies: the Effect of Uncertainty

Author

Listed:
  • Michele Moretto

    (University of Padova)

  • Sergio Vergalli

    (FEEM and University of Brescia)

Abstract

In our article we study how uncertainty affects migration choice and how networks are able to mitigate its effects. In particular, we describe a real option model where the migration choice depends on both the wage differential between the host country and the country of origin, and on a network of homogeneous immigrants. By looking at the labour market uncertainty, the optimal migration decision of an individual consists of waiting to migrate in a (coordinated) mass of individuals. By looking at policy uncertainty, we try to explain if it is better for the government to tighten or relax limits for immigrants in order to control migration inflows. Our results show that promoting uncertainty over migration limit may improve the government's control on migration inflows (quotas). In particular, we show that if the government controls the information related to the immigration stock it could delay the mass entry of immigrants, maintaining the required stock in the long run and controlling the flows in the short-run. Therefore, if the government's aim is to delay and/or control entry migration waves, it could control the uncertainty on the information related to the immigration quota.

Suggested Citation

  • Michele Moretto & Sergio Vergalli, 2012. "European Migration Policies: the Effect of Uncertainty," Review of Environment, Energy and Economics - Re3, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:fem:femre3:2012.06-02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://re3.feem.it/getpage.aspx?id=4894
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Immigration; Real Option; Quota;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J2 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fem:femre3:2012.06-02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alberto Prina Cerai (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/feemmit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.