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Received research shows numerous motives for migration, but fewer reasons for return migration. This paper aims to correct this imbalance. Twelve reasons for return migration are presented and discussed briefly. The reasons listed are derived from research on migration conducted by the author in the course of the past three and a half decades. The purpose of the paper is to pull together the insights gained from that research so as to formulate a base for future inquiry, both analytical and empirical. In addition, just as research on motives for migration can help to establish the reasons for return migration, research on the latter can help to deepen understanding of the former. Moreover, in a great many circumstances and for a variety of reasons, countries that host migrants may want them to leave. In such circumstances, enacting policies that align with motives for return migration will be more efficient than devising measures that are independent of these motives.

We study the relative risk aversion of an individual with particular social preferences: his wellbeing is influenced by his relative wealth, and by how concerned he is about having low relative wealth. Holding constant the individual's absolute wealth, we obtain two results. First, if the individual's level of concern about low relative wealth does not change, the individual becomes more risk averse when he rises in the wealth hierarchy. Second, if the individual's level of concern about low relative wealth intensifies when he rises in the wealth hierarchy and if, in precise sense, this intensification is strong enough, then the individual becomes less risk averse: the individual's desire to advance further in the wealth hierarchy is more important to him than possibly missing out on a better rank.

This paper explores the following chain of conjectures: rising use of the internet, the widespread access to global information, and intensified communication between regions and countries brought about, for example, by intensified trade links bring about expansion of people's social space and their set of comparators; this expansion increases people's stress and strengthens their inclination to resort to migration as a means of reducing this heightened stress. Other things held constant, the expansion of people's social space intensifies their inclination to move across geographical space.

This paper adds three dimensions to the received literature: it models migration when the individuals' preferences regarding their relative income are ordinal, it works out the resulting spatial steady-state distribution of the individuals, and it shows that the aggregate of the individuals' migration choices in the spatial steady-state distribution sums up to the social optimum. This finding does not apply when the individuals' preferences regarding their relative income are cardinal. We highlight the importance of the assumption about the nature of the individuals' social preferences (whether ordinal or cardinal) to studying and predicting their migration behavior, and to elucidating the consequences of that behavior for social welfare.

Social comparisons are important in the employment sphere. A "culture of unemployment" may evolve and prevail because it is optimal for an individual to remain unemployed when other unemployed individuals constitute his main reference group. We advance the idea that by making the receipt of unemployment benefits conditional on engagement in an incentive-enhancing activity (for example, work under state-sponsored employment schemes or participation in work-site-based training programs), a government can engineer a revision of the reference groups of an unemployed individual in order to induce him to seek work.

When individuals' utility is a convex combination of their income and their concern at having a low relative income (the weights attached to income and to the concern at having a low relative income sum up to one), the maximization of aggregate utility yields an equal income distribution. This alignment of utilitarianism and egalitarianism is obtained for any number of individuals, and for general utility functions that are convex combinations of a power function of income and the concern at having a low relative income. The alignment can also hold when the weights sum up to a number different than one.

Drawing on the premise that the integration of economies revises people's social space and their comparators, we quantify social stress by aggregate relative deprivation, ARD; we calculate the effect of monetary mergers on ARD; and we document the validity of the superadditivity property of ARD for successive adoptions of a common currency by European countries. One feature of monetary unification, which replaces diverse currencies with a common currency, is that it brings about a change in the comparison environment, expanding the reference space of individuals in a given country to encompass individuals from the joining countries. Overall, calculations regarding six enlargements of the Economic and Monetary Union between 1999 and 2011 reveal an increase of ARD on six occasions when we hold incomes constant, and on five when we take into consideration changes in incomes. In addition, we observe an uneven distribution of the costs and benefits from monetary integration among the participating countries when these costs and benefits are measured in terms of ARD.

We present and test the idea that bequest planning is linked with the experience of inheriting. We consider "a family tradition of bequeathing" as a channel through which the intention to bequeath is moulded by and is positively correlated with the experience of inheriting. Using data from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we find that the experience of inheriting enhances the intention to bequeath, independently of the positive impact of wealth. We also find that the expectation of inheriting has a positive impact on the intention to bequeath, controlling for the expected increase in wealth on account of future inheritances.

This paper looks at the integration of regions and nations through the prism of the merger of populations (societies). The paper employs a particular index of social stress. Stylized examples of the merging of two populations suggest that with integration, the social stress index will increase. The examples form the basis for the development of new formulas for calculating the social stress of an integrated population as a function of the levels of social stress of the constituent populations when apart. The formulas reveal that the social stress of an integrated population is higher than the sum of the levels of social stress of the constituent populations when apart. This raises the distinct possibility that the merging of populations may be a social liability: integration may fail to give the populace a sense of improved wellbeing.

We relate an observed difference between single men (SM) and single women (SW) in attitudes towards risk to the higher value assigned to social status by SM than by SW. In the marriage market, low status carries a harsher penalty for SM than for SW because when selecting a partner, the social status of a man is more important to a woman than the social status of a woman is to a man. Correlating social status with relative wealth, we show how intensified distaste at experiencing low relative wealth reduces relative risk aversion.

We study the impact of gender quotas on the acquisition of human capital. We assume that individuals' formation of human capital is influenced by the prospect of landing high-pay top positions, and that these positions are regulated by gender-specific quotas. In the absence of quotas, women consider their chances of getting top positions to be lower than men's. The lure of top positions induces even men of relatively low ability to engage in human capital formation, whereas women of relatively high ability do not expect to get top positions and do not therefore engage in human capital formation. Gender quotas discourage men who are less efficient in forming human capital, and encourage women who are more efficient in forming human capital. We provide a condition under which the net result of the institution of gender quotas is an increase in human capital in the economy as a whole.

We demonstrate that a rank-preserving transfer from a richer individual to a poorer individual can exacerbate income inequality (when inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient). This happens when individuals' preferences depend negatively not only on work time (effort) but also on low relative income. It is rigorously shown that the set of preference profiles that gives rise to this perverse effect of a transfer on inequality is a non-empty open subset of all preference profiles. A robust example illustrates this result. -- A rank-preserving inequality-narrowing transfer ; The Gini coefficient ; Low relative income ; Relative deprivation ; Exacerbated inequality

We investigate the impact of the imposition of sanctions for employing illegal migrants on the welfare of native workers. Our analysis is based on the premise that in response to such sanctions, managers in a firm may be reassigned from supervision of production to verification of the legality of the firm's workforce. When there is full employment in the host country, a profit-maximizing firm will assign managers to verification if the sanctions are steep enough. This reassignment impedes production efficiency and, consequently, leads to a reduction in the wages of both illegal migrants and native workers, inevitably hurting the latter, who are the intended beneficiaries of the sanctions. -- Employer sanctions ; Illegal migrant workers ; Natives' welfare ; The formation of public policy

A theory is developed of labor migration that is prompted by a desire to avoid "social humiliation". In a general equilibrium framework it is shown that as long as migration can reduce humiliation sufficiently, migration will occur even between two identical economies. Migration increases the number of individuals who choose to perform degrading jobs and consequently, migration lowers the price of the good produced in the sector that is associated with low social status. Moreover, the greater an individual's aversion to performing degrading jobs, the more likely it is that he will experience a welfare gain when the economy opens up. -- migration ; social distance ; occupational status ; social exposure gains ; general equilibrium