On the Economic Geography of International Migration

31 Pages Posted: 3 Jan 2015

See all articles by Caglar Ozden

Caglar Ozden

World Bank - Research Department

Christopher Robert Parsons

The University of Western Australia - Department of Economics

Abstract

We exploit the bilateral and skill dimensions from recent data sets of international migration to test for the existence of Zipf's and Gibrat's Laws in the context of aggregate and high-skilled international immigration and emigration using graphical, parametric and non-parametric analysis. The top tails of the distributions of aggregate and high-skilled immigrants and emigrants adhere to a Pareto distribution with an exponent of unity i.e. Zipf's Law holds.We find some evidence in favour of Gibrat's Law holding for immigration stocks, i.e. that the growth in stocks is independent of their initial values and stronger evidence that immigration densities are diverging over time. Conversely, emigrant stocks are converging in the sense that countries with smaller emigrant stocks are growing faster than their larger sovereign counterparts. Lastly, high skilled immigration and emigration stocks expressed in levels or as densities all exhibit signs of convergence. We conclude by discussing some competing mechanisms that could be driving the observed patterns including: differing fertility rates, reductions in emigration restrictions, migrant sorting and selective immigration policies, immigrant networks and persisting wage differentials.

Keywords: Zipf's Law, Gibrat's Law, international migration

JEL Classification: F22, J61, O15

Suggested Citation

Özden, Çaglar and Parsons, Christopher Robert, On the Economic Geography of International Migration. IZA Discussion Paper No. 8747, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2544811 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2544811

Çaglar Özden (Contact Author)

World Bank - Research Department ( email )

1818 H Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20433
United States

HOME PAGE: http://econ.worldbank.org/staff/cozden

Christopher Robert Parsons

The University of Western Australia - Department of Economics ( email )

35 Stirling Highway
Crawley, Western Australia 6009
Australia

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