Essays on economic growth and international migration

This thesis consists of four distinct chapters. In Chapter 1, I develop a model that aims to investigate the economic and demographic impacts of three effects of the HIV-AIDS epidemic in developing countries. The direct effect of the HIV epidemic is that it increases mortality and morbidity. The two indirect effects, resulting from the first, are the reduction in productivity of adults and the transmission of the disease to their offsprings. I allow these different effects to act either separately or together, and I investigate the marginal efficiency of health expenditures on the survival probability of individuals and demographics. In the Chapter 2, I develop a two-period overlapping-generation model featuring the effects of child nutrition in developing countries. The model gives rise to multiple equilibria including poverty traps. I show that child nutrition status may affect the development of human capital unfavourably and lead countries into poverty. Various exogenous foreign aid policies implemented by international organizations such as the World Food Programme (WFP) are considered like school feeding programs, subsidise food prices and provision of fixed food in households. In the Chapter 3, along with co-authors, we identify and quantify the role of international migration in the propagation of HIV across sub-Saharan African countries. The last chapter of this thesis focuses on the effects of International migration on the economic performance of the receiving countries after a liberalization shock. Complex interactions between high-skilled migration and aggregate performance govern the dynamics of growth and inequality across nations. Due to lack of data, these interdependencies have not been extensively studied in the economics literature. This Chapter takes advantage of the availability of rich panel data on the mobility of talented football players, and the performances of national leagues and teams to quantify the effect of a "globalization" shock, the 1995 Bosman rule, on global efficiency and cross-country inequality in football.(ECON 3) -- UCL, 201