Poverty Traps, Distance, and Diversity: The Migration Connection

Jeffrey G. Williamson

NBER Working Paper No. 12549
Issued in October 2006

---- Acknowledgements ----

Invited opening lecture to be delivered at the Conference on The Economics of Diversity, Migration, and Culture, Bologna, Italy (September 22-23, 2006). The lecture draws on a recent book Global Migration and the World Economy: Two Centuries of Policy and Performance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2005), written with Timothy J. Hatton. Tim also helped point me in the right direction for some of the county-of-birth data used here, as did Alberto Alesina and Romain Warziarg for some of the ethnicity data and its interpretation. I am very grateful to all three of them. I also acknowledge the excellent research assistance of Will Nygard, and the financial support of the National Science Foundation SES-0001362 and the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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