A standard view in the migration literature is that of a fixed family sending off a migrant who may leave his or her spouse and children behind. We show empirically that changing marital status after migration is widespread for migrants moving from developing countries to the United States, so that the family unit itself changes with migration. Only one-third of ever-married adult migrants are currently married to a spouse they wed before migration. The variance of spousal characteristics is higher for migrants than nonmigrants. Using a survey experiment with young unmarried Mexican men, we find that they have more uncertainty about the characteristics of their future spouses should they migrate than if they were to stay at home, and that priming them to think about marriage reduces their expressed likelihood of migrating. We draw out implications of these counterfactual spouses for empirical research on migration decisions and effects and for migration policy.

The epidemiological approach in comparative development uses data on individuals of immigrant origin to study cultural persistence, the determinants of cultural norms, and the effects of genetic traits. A common assumption of this methodology is its susceptibility to attenuation bias. We challenge it by demonstrating how the increasing reliance on foreign ancestries to identify respondents' origins can introduce confounding biases. Specifically, self-selection in reporting foreign ancestry and unobserved variation in ancestral migration timing may lead to inflated estimates. We formalize these mechanisms through a theoretical framework and illustrate their empirical significance by reassessing key findings from influential studies by Fern & aacute;ndez and Fogli (2006) and Giuliano and Nunn (2021).

Giuliano and Nunn (2021) provide econometric evidence that ancestral climatic variability reduces the current importance of tradition. We conduct a "deep reproduction", comparing the precise descriptions of the individual-level regressions in their article with the corresponding code. This analysis uncovers several major inconsistencies, also related to the code not included in their replication package. A published corrigendum addresses some inconsistencies we had also communicated to the Editor of REStud, but several remain, relating to a substantial portion of the observations. A realignment of the code with the text reveals a more nuanced relationship between ancestral climatic variability and tradition.

Migration changes how families form and dissolve, and how one should conceptualize the family. This has implications for thinking about how the migration decision is modelled when individuals are unable to picture the counterfactual families they may have. Differences in marital status can induce two otherwise identical individuals to make different migration decisions. It also has implications for attempts to causally estimate impacts of migration, when the family composition changes with the migration decision itself. This paper shows empirically that changing marital status after migration is widespread, and that the traditional model of a fixed family sending off a migrant who remains part of that same family only describes a minority of migrants moving from developing countries to the U.S. The authors draw out lessons from thinking about counterfactual families for empirical research and for migration policy.

We provide evidence that Hispanic citizens receive significantly longer sentences than non-Hispanic citizens in the Federal Criminal Justice System in the United States when a higher number of illegal aliens are apprehended along the southwest border. Apprehensions can increase the salience of Hispanic ethnic identity, which is associated with persistent negative stereotypes, and can also deteriorate attitudes toward Hispanics. We rule out concerns that apprehensions might be conveying legally relevant information to judges. Thus, we provide direct evidence for time-varying discrimination toward Hispanic defendants. Our estimated effect is only at play for defendants without a heavy previous criminal record.

We provide evidence that most Mexican children exposed to the international migration of their fathers experience further variations in their living arrangements or the dissolution of the marital union of their parents. Children left behind typically join the household of their maternal grandparents. These changes have relevant implications for the analysis of the effects of migration and remittances: they interfere with the identification of instances of paternal migration in standard cross-sectional or longitudinal surveys, and they can give rise to heterogeneity in the effects of interest making some key household-level variables endogenous with respect to the treatment.

This manual has been written to respond to the need of making available an exhaustive compilation in the Italian language of the main topics and problems of the political economy of development in poor countries. So far, a discussion of such topics in Italian has not been available. The drafting of this manual has benefitted from the teaching and research experience of several academics of the faculty of economics of the university of Florence. Part 1 focuses on key methodological approaches derived from the theory of collective choices. In turn, Part 2 discusses the orthodox and heterodox macroeconomic reforms applied in developing countries, and their problems. Part 3 illustrates the domestic policies that have been or should have been adopted in the field of food security, land reform, environmental sustainability, taxation, social spending, labor markets and population. Part 4 discusses then the domestic policy reforms in the field of international trade, foreign direct investments, capital flows and international migration. Last, Part 5 illustrates the historical experience of five policy regimes (i.e. the import substituting industrialization, redistributive approaches, the Asian Miracle, Washington Consensus, and Sustainable Development) that have been introduced in the non-socialist developing countries between the decolonization of the 1950s and the present time. The methodological approach followed in the manual starts from an evaluation of the real-life impact on growth, income distribution, the wellbeing of the population, and the environment of the policies adopted during each policy regime and in the main economic areas. Whenever the policy measures introduced in the past generated unsatisfactory results, the manual suggests possible alternatives inspired by the structuralist and Keynesian schools.

More than 3 million asylum seekers arrived into Europe between 2014 and 2016, and we analyze the role of destination-specific policy measures in shaping their location choices. We bring to the data a gravity equation that reflects the uncertainty that asylum seekers face, concerning the chances of obtaining refugee protection, the processing time and the risk of repatriation. These factors shaped the distribution of asylum seekers, and produced heterogeneous effects across different origin countries. German efforts to expand their processing capacity produced a significant increase in applications from origins with high recognition rates, which were mostly diverted away from Sweden.

We use a multilevel approach to investigate whether a general and robust relationship between weather shocks and (internal and international) migration intentions can be uncovered in Western African countries. We combine individual survey data with measures of localized weather shocks for 13 countries over the 2008-2016 period. A meta-analysis on results from about 51,000 regressions is conducted to identify the specification of weather anomalies that maximizes the goodness of fit of our empirical model. We then use this best specification to document heterogeneous mobility responses to weather shocks. We find that variability in Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index/rainfall is associated with changing intentions to move locally or internationally in a few countries only. However, the significance, sign and magnitude of the effect are far from being robust and consistent across countries. These differences might be due to imperfections in the data or to differences in long-term climate conditions and adaptation capabilities. They may also suggest that credit constraints are internalized differently in different settings, or that moving internally is not a relevant option as weather conditions are spatially correlated while moving abroad is an option of last resort. Although our multilevel approach allows us to connect migration intentions with the timing and spatial dimension of weather shocks, identifying a common specification that governs weather-driven mobility decisions is a very difficult, if not impossible, task, even for countries belonging to the same region. Our findings also call for extreme caution before generalizing results from specific case studies.

We analyze the role of origin-destination-time specific policy measures in shaping the location choices of asylum seekers across European countries. We estimate a gravity equation that reflects the uncertainty that asylum seekers face concerning the chances of obtaining refugee protection, the processing time and the risk of repatriation. German efforts to expand their processing capacity are correlated with a significant increase in applications from origins with high recognition rates, which were mostly diverted away from Sweden. For Syrians, the observed variations in processing times increased applications in Germany by 16.1 percent, and led to a 35.3 percent reduction in Sweden between 2014 and 2015.

"Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are". Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was among the firsts to recognize the relationship between identity and food consumption. Food adoption choices are much less exposed to external judgment and social pressure than other individual behaviours, and can be observed over a long period. That makes them an interesting basis for, among other applications, studying the integration of immigrants from a food consumption viewpoint. Indeed, in this work we analyze immigrants' food consumption from shopping retail data for understanding if and how it converges towards those of natives. As core contribution of our proposal, we define a score of adoption of natives' consumption habits by an individual as the probability of being recognized as a native from a machine learning classifier, thus adopting a completely data-driven approach. We measure the immigrant's adoption of natives' consumption behavior over a long time, and we identify different trends. A case study on real data of a large nation-wide supermarket chain reveals that we can distinguish five main different groups of immigrants depending on their trends of native consumption adoption.

We use mobile phone usage data to measure the extent of segregation of Syrian refugees in Turkey, and analyze its role in their internal mobility patterns. We construct a range of dissimilarity and normalized isolation indices using the hourly phone call volume of refugees and natives. The richness of the data allows us to compute the indices across different provinces and over time. Segregation levels show high variation across the country, with significantly lower levels of segregation in provinces with a higher share of refugees. Refugee mobility across provinces over time appears to be negatively correlated with segregation at destination, while native mobility is not. Based on data from Istanbul, segregation does not influence intra-province mobility. This is possibly due to the differences in segregation indices across the hours of the day, suggesting that residential segregation is higher than labor market segregation.

How can big data help to understand the migration phenomenon? In this paper, we try to answer this question through an analysis of various phases of migration, comparing traditional and novel data sources and models at each phase. We concentrate on three phases of migration, at each phase describing the state of the art and recent developments and ideas. The first phase includes the journey , and we study migration flows and stocks, providing examples where big data can have an impact. The second phase discusses the stay , i.e. migrant integration in the destination country. We explore various data sets and models that can be used to quantify and understand migrant integration, with the final aim of providing the basis for the construction of a novel multi-level integration index. The last phase is related to the effects of migration on the source countries and the return of migrants.