Research

We investigate whether and how partisan politics played a role in the Netherlands. To do so, we review existing literature and prepare descriptive statistics from recent datasets. We focus on two related questions: 1) Do we find any signs of partisan politics in the Netherlands? 2) Do developments in party and voter behavior influence the relevance of partisan influences for Dutch governance? Given limited existing research with a macro-level perspective and a focus on the Netherlands, we graphically and descriptively explore the relationship between government ideology and traditional partisan outcome variables, acknowledging the limits of such an investigation. Our descriptive analysis does not suggest a large influence of political ideology on policy-making in the Netherlands, but we observe emerging volatility between changes in government and policy-making since the early 2000s. Exploring the role of party and voter movements, we also document a shifting political landscape in which the potential for traditional partisan influences has become limited.

This chapter highlights the importance of remittances for development, by sketching the magnitude of current and past remittance flows to developing countries and outlines some of the key characteristics of remittances. It discusses the impact of remittances on economic growth and focuses on the relationship between remittances and financial development in the recipient economy. In the context of voluntary labor migration, remittances result from an active migration decision of one or more members of a household aiming to increase the household’s overall income with earnings that are higher than what they would have earned at home. The most important difference between remittances and other sources of external funding of developing countries is that remittances are person-to-person transfers. Using a mutual altruism framework H. Rapoport and F. Docquier show analytically how the volume of the altruistic remittance transfer depends on the altruistic preferences of migrants and recipients as well as on their respective incomes.

This paper introduces a new dataset that estimates the volume of human travel across country borders worldwide between 1995 and 2022. It builds and expands on pioneering work that presented estimates for 2011 to 2016 (Recchi et al., 2019). The dataset enables the study of the volume, directions, and changes in global human mobility. Our estimates reveal that total transnational mobility increased from 4.87 billion trips in 1995 to 9.64 billion in 2019, vastly outpacing global population growth. Across the board, international migration constitutes a tiny fraction of transnational travel (less than 1% worldwide and as low as .15% in Europe). The rise of transnational mobility has been particularly sustained in East and South-East Asia. This region was, however, also the hardest hit by Covid-19 travel restrictions and their aftermath, which brought its flows in 2022 back to mid-1990s levels. Most border crossings are intra-regional, especially in Europe. Despite the widespread growth in volume, the global network of cross-border mobility has not significantly changed its overall configuration around nine major clusters in more than a quarter of a century. Germany stands out as the main hub in Europe and globally, followed by the US and China. However, some regional mobility clusters have split and others have merged, with individual countries shifting between clusters. The dataset may be used to study global-level phenomena in fields such as migration and tourism studies, sustainability, epidemiology, international economics, and international relations.

Food insecurity and the absence of legal identity represent the most severe deficiencies in vital and existential human capabilities. These extreme situations expose ‘scandalous inequalities’ between the haves and have-nots on a global scale. This article proposes addressing these issues simultaneously by introducing a Humanity Identity Card (HIC), coupled with a Basic Income Supplement (BIS) targeting the most vulnerable half of the world’s population. This global social policy aims to expedite the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals 16.9 and 2.1. The initial funding for the HIC could be sourced from contributions amounting to 0.66% of the gross domestic product of sovereign states, 0.66% of the market capitalisation of major corporations, and 0.66% of the wealth of billionaire households. The HIC would permanently provide universal recognition of individual identity, while the BIS is designed to be gradually phased out as its benefits take effect. Additionally, the worldwide implementation of this policy can foster a sense of shared responsibility in addressing global challenges.

We study to what extent exposure to negative stereotypes affects behavior. Theory suggests that when people care about their social identity, negative stereotypes may trigger behaviors in the domain of the stereotype that restore one’s social image. In an online lab experiment, we exogenously vary university students’ perceptions about the prevalence of the stereotype that “young people are lazy” and test whether this affects effort provision in a real effort task. We do not find average treatment effects between students who received information about a high prevalence of the stereotype vs. students who received information about a low prevalence. We also do not find evidence that those who strongly identify as hardworking respond differently to the stereotype compared to those who weakly identify as hardworking. Yet, we find that the migrants in our sample reduce their work effort more than non-migrants when the prevalence of the stereotype is perceived to be high. This suggests that members of minority groups, who often face stereotypes and challenges associated with their social identity, may be vulnerable to additional negative stereotyping.

This paper investigates global inequality in the international mobility of persons. Leveraging the novel Global Transnational Mobility Dataset 2.0, we compare mobility rates across 230 countries or areas, resulting in global mobility Gini indices from 1995 to 2022. While de jure inequalities in mobility rights have been widely conceptualized and examined, we address the de facto inequalities in cross-border movements of persons. We compute Gini coefficients for different notions of global inequality, highlighting inequality between countries and inequality between (average) individual residents of countries. We find that global mobility Ginis are substantially higher than global income Ginis. Global mobility Ginis have been slightly but constantly decreasing from 1995 until the COVID-19 pandemic, when they shot up. Since the pandemic, they are returning to the prior mean, although in 2022, they were still close to the levels of two decades earlier.

In this paper, we investigate whether recent empirical critiques of the gravity model of migration withstand scrutiny. In particular, we show that methods and techniques developed in the trade gravity literature also allow for the description and explanation of temporal patterns of migration flows across countries.

Recent research has estimated the size of transnational passenger flows globally, highlighting that some corridors are massively more popular than others (Glaesser et al 2017; Recchi and Deutschmann 2019; Deutschmann 2021; Llano et al 2023). We also know which destinations are more or less accessible depending on travelers’ citizenship, due to the ‘power of passports’ and visa constraints placed by sovereign states (Neumayer 2006; Mau et al 2015; Czaika and Neumayer 2017; Kochenov and Lindeboom 2020; Anonymous 2021). We know almost nothing, however, about the cost differences of international travel. This paper aims to fill this research lacuna by relying on a novel global dataset that includes all the available cross-border travel combinations between 722 origin-destination sites covering 177 countries in the world.

During the Second World War, about a quarter of a million Dutch men were forced to work in Germany. Also known as the ‘Arbeitseinsatz’, all men aged 17-40 were at risk of being called and sent to German labor camps. The Arbeitseinsatz had grave consequences for the communities that were left behind. Refusal of the call resulted in reprisals or violent arrestations, yet obedience to the call would often result in heavy work under sometimes dangerous circumstances (Anne Frank House, n.d.). We operationalize archival information on forced labor and deportations in the Netherlands during the period of 1940-1945 by the Dutch National Archive, and investigate the long-term consequences of the Arbeitseinsatz on current civic engagement in the Netherlands. We will explore whether those communities that were exposed to higher levels of forced labor became less engaged in the public sphere, less trusting in others and institutions, and transmitted these social norms to future generations.

Theory suggests that cultural similarity increases migration flows between countries. This paper brings best practices from the trade gravity literature to migration to test this prediction. In my preferred specification, I use lags of time-varying similarity variables in a panel of international and domestic migration flows (>200 countries, 1990-2019, 5-year intervals) and estimate a theory-consistent, empirical gravity model with origin-year, destination-year, and corridor fixed effects. The results do not show the hypothesized positive effect of cultural similarity on migration. Instead, religious similarity has a significant negative effect on migration, while WVS-based attitudinal similarities regarding individualism, indulgence, and trust are insignificant. Additional results suggest that cultural selection and sorting can explain these findings, where migrants are attracted by destinations that are culturally similar to their personal cultural beliefs rather than the average cultural beliefs of their home country. Results of a two-stage fixed effects (TSFE) procedure and a gravity-specific matching estimator, which both allow the estimation of time-invariant similarity variables, confirm that the relationship between cultural similarity and migration is more nuanced than previously thought.

This paper compares different measures of international migration flows used in research. Because direct measures of migration flows are available only for selected countries, practitioners often use estimates of migration flows. However, which of the various estimates should they use? First, we use a wide range of error statistics for all common estimates of migration flows to test well they approximate actual, recorded migration flows. So-called “demographic accounting” estimates correlate the best with recorded flows and are the most precise estimates (lowest root mean squared error). However, the "migration rates" estimates, which are the least precise, yield the most unbiased estimate of average flow sizes (lowest mean error). Second, we estimate a gravity model using each flow estimate as the dependent variable and compare the resulting coefficients to coefficients from a benchmark model using recorded flows as the dependent variable. Our results suggest that recent “pseudo-Bayesian demographic accounting” estimates yield coefficients that are the most similar compared to the coefficients of the benchmark model. The reverse negative version of the “stock difference” measures also performs well. Yet, overall, our results show that the different estimates can lead to differing conclusions regarding the determinants of international migration in a gravity model.