Date of Award
5-1-2023
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Economics
First Advisor
Lahiri, Sajal
Abstract
This paper aims to provide an empirical analysis of asylum seeking, migration, and international trade. These issues are among the most pressing challenges of our time and understanding the various factors that drive these phenomena and the relationships between them is crucial. Through rigorous analysis and examination of real-world data, this paper aims to contribute valuable insights into these topics. The paper is structured into three chapters, each focusing on a specific area of investigation. The first chapter explores the impact of asylum decisions on future asylum applications. Utilizing a panel data approach that covers 205 countries from 2000 to 2019, the study uses the gravity model with both origin and destination time fixed effects to investigate the heterogeneity of this impact across different countries. The findings indicate a significant and positive relationship between successful asylum decisions and subsequent applications, highlighting the critical role of initial decisions in shaping future outcomes. This chapter's findings have important implications for policymakers and practitioners involved in asylum processes, particularly in decision-making processes and their potential long-term effects on asylum applications. In the second chapter, the paper reexamines the hypothesis that the ethnic composition of the population affects international trade, using a more comprehensive dataset and up-to-date methodology. The study employs recent developments in gravity analysis, including pairwise, importer-time, and exporter-time fixed effects. By estimating a gravity model using bilateral trade and migrant stock data from around 205 countries from 2000 to 2014, the study finds a positive and significant relationship between migrant stock and international trade. The result remains robust after controlling for free-trade areas and similarities/dissimilarities of the trading partners. This chapter's findings provide new insights into the complex relationship between ethnic composition, migration, and international trade, with potential implications for policymakers and practitioners involved in trade and migration policies. The third chapter investigates the relationship between international trade and international migration, with a focus on the role of trade tariffs. The analysis examines bilateral migration flow and bilateral trade tariffs for 100 countries from 2000-2014, including exporter-imposed tariffs, which previous research has not addressed. By employing gravity analysis with importer time and exporter-time fixed effects, the results reveal that in OLS estimations, both importer and exporter-imposed tariffs are substitutes, while in Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimations, only exporter-imposed tariffs are substitutes. There is no evidence to suggest that importer-imposed tariffs are substitutes or complementary. These findings have significant implications for policymakers and practitioners involved in trade and migration policies, particularly in understanding the potential effects of trade tariffs on migration flows. In conclusion, this paper provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of asylum seeking, migration, and international trade, focusing on the various factors that drive these phenomena and the relationships between them. The findings of this study have significant implications for policymakers involved in decision-making processes related to these issues. The study's rigorous analysis and use of real-world data provide valuable insights into some of the most contemporary issues.
Access
This dissertation is Open Access and may be downloaded by anyone.