The Age of Mass Migration: Economic and Institutional Determinants, mimeo

This paper studies the determinants of the mass migration waves that took place between the Old and the New World in the period that runs from the middle of the 19th century until World War I. We focus our attention on the institutional forces that contributed to standard economic fundamentals. In particular, we evaluate the potential impact on migra-tion decisions of migration policy and democracy. Migration policy is proxied by the kind of citizenship laws (i.e., jus soli vs. jus sanguinis) in place in each country during the period under investigation. Our results confirm the relevance of the economic factors established by previous research. Income differentials, the level of development and the demographic struc-ture of the population play a significant role in the determination of the rate of immigration for the countries in our sample. However, we also find evidence of an important influence of institutions, and in particular migration policy, since countries with a more open citizenship policy display higher migration rates after controlling for standard economic factors. Our results hold after accounting for the potential endogeneity of institutions, through a set of instruments exploiting colonial history and legal origin