Human Migration – Labor Market, Public Perception and Future Prospects

The presented thesis addresses various facets of international migration from an economic perspective. Chapter 1 develops a general equilibrium model for quantifying the impact of labor migration on economic welfare and inequality in host societies. The model's design allows for a ceteris paribus analysis of various labor market specifications commonly used in the literature. They range from a perfect competition framework -- assuming full employment and labor force participation -- to more sophisticated labor market mechanisms in which employment and labor market participation are determined endogenously. Our analysis investigates how much the labor market specification affects the model's outcomes. Altogether, we find that the modeled labor market design has only little impact on welfare and inequality effects. Chapter 2 addresses the question whether official police reporting on crime can have an impact on migration skepticism. In particular, we want to know whether the (non-)disclosure of nationality information about suspects in police press releases affects public discourses in social media. For this purpose, we collect more than 1.5 million press releases from 220 police units in Germany and trace their diffusion path on Twitter. Using an instrumental variable and an event study design, we attempt to quantify the causal effect of nationality disclosure on reach and tension of the debates. Our results suggest that disclosing the nationality of crime suspects increases the reach of police press releases, leads to more user engagement, and results in more hateful posts. Chapter 3 attempts to forecast the impact of climate change on global migration in the 21st century. To this end, we develop a world economy model covering the movement of working-age people across almost all countries in the world and between rural/urban regions. The model simulates different climate change scenarios with varying degrees of change in temperature and sea level. Our results suggest that, in the 21st century, climate change will mainly trigger local or intrastate mobility. Climate-induced migration from low-income to high-income countries is likely to exhibit brain drain patterns.