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International Migration With Heterogeneous Agents: Theory and Evidence for Germany, 1967–2009
Author(s) -
Brücker Herbert,
Schröder Philipp J. H.
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
the world economy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.594
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1467-9701
pISSN - 0378-5920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9701.2011.01426.x
Subject(s) - cointegration , economics , econometrics , stock (firearms) , unit root , german , financial economics , geography , archaeology
Temporary migration, though empirically relevant, is often ignored in formal models. This paper proposes a migration model with heterogeneous agents and persistent cross country income differentials that features temporary migration. In equilibrium there exists a positive relation between the stock of migrants and the income differential, while the net migration flow becomes zero. Consequently, existing empirical migration models, estimating net migration flows, instead of stocks, may be misspecified. This suspicion appears to be confirmed by our investigation of the cointegration relationships of German migration stocks and flows since 1967. We find that (i) panel‐unit root tests reject the hypothesis that migration flows and the explanatory variables are integrated of the same order, while migration stocks and the explanatory variables are all I(1) variables, and (ii) the hypothesis of cointegration cannot be rejected for the stock model.