Migration and Development Finance

The research group Migration and Development Finance studies how people and capital move between low- and middle-income countries and the rest of the world, and how policy in sending and receiving countries shapes these flows. Our work focuses on Africa. In both strands we aim to identify policies that serve the mutual interest of sending and receiving countries and are therefore politically more sustainable.

On migration, we study how people form migration aspirations and whether they act on them, how European asylum and labor migration policy influences these decisions, and how emigration affects origin countries. Our evidence comes from surveys, panel data, and field and survey experiments, often collected in West Africa.

On development finance, we study foreign aid, Chinese lending and infrastructure finance, African sovereign borrowing, and macro-financial policy in emerging economies. Two questions recur in this work: what providers of finance get in return, and which political and economic constraints limit what the finance achieves.

Migration and development finance meet in our research on whether development aid can address the root causes of migration.