Migration is often temporary, and the intended length of stay in the host country is an important determinant of immigrants’ integration. This paper investigates whether shocks to safety conditions in the home country affect immigrants’ return intentions and labor market behavior. We combine administrative and survey data with precise information on violent events worldwide and exploit the quasi-random occurrence of violent events in the home country relative to the timing of interviews and job separations in Germany. We show that immigrants interviewed after a violent event in their home country are 12 percentage points more likely to wish to remain in Germany permanently. The effects are stronger if immigrants are less integrated in Germany and have close family members in their home country. Consistent with the prediction that revisions to the intended length of stay affect immigrants’ labor market behavior, we show that immigrants who enter unemployment when a violent event hits their home country increase their job search effort and find employment faster. However, the same immigrants trade immediate job security for lower earnings, less stable jobs and less productive firms.

Brain drain is a growing concern for many countries experiencing large emigration rates of their highly educated citizens. While several European countries have designed tax schemes to attract high-skilled expatriates and foreigners, there is limited empirical evidence on the effectiveness of fiscal incentives in a context of brain drain, and on migration responses to income tax differentials beyond top earners. In this paper we investigate the effects of the Italian 2010 tax scheme (“Controesodo”), which granted a generous income tax reduction to high-skilled expatriates who relocate to Italy. Eligibility required a college degree as well as being born in 1969 or later, which creates suitable quasi-experimental conditions to identify the effect of tax incentives. Using a Diff-in-Diff strategy and administrative data on return migration, we find that eligible individuals are 27-34% more likely to move back to Italy post-reform. Additionally, using social security data from the main origin country of returnees (Germany), we uncover effects along the whole wage distribution, showing that tax-induced migration is a broader phenomenon beyond top earners. A cost-benefit analysis reveals that the net fiscal impact of the tax scheme is marginally positive by targeting young and high-skilled individuals.  

Though returns to school spending are highly controversial in the literature, between 2014 and 2020 Italian schools received more than 3 billion of EU Funds to be spent on improving infrastructures and offering extra-curricular training to students. What were the effects of this generous funding scheme on students' performance? We combine data on individual-level standardized test scores with detailed information on projects' ranking in tenders and roll-out timing, and evaluate different projects using RD design and staggered DiD. RD results show that schools that marginally win tenders acquire and spend the requested funds on infrastructures and students' training programs. Both RD and staggered DiD show that projects aimed at improving basic and soft skills increase students' standardized scores in Italian, Math and English, while projects focused on the internalization of educational careers have zero to negative effects on Math and Italian, while they improve English skills.