Oded Stark
Oded Stark is Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Development Research, University of Bonn, Distinguished Professor at the University of Warsaw, Adjunct Professor at the University of Tuebingen, and Distinguished Research Scholar at Georgetown University. He served as University Professor (Chair in Economic and Regional Policy) at the University of Klagenfurt and as Honorary University Professor of Economics at the University of Vienna, and prior to that as Professor of Economics (Chair in Development Economics) at the University of Oslo, and as Professor of Population and Economics and as the Director of the Migration and Development Program at Harvard University. He has written on applied microeconomic theory, development economics, population economics, the economics of migration, labor economics, evolutionary economics, urban economics, regional economics, welfare economics, and the theory of the firm. He is the author of the critically acclaimed books The Migration of Labor (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1991 and 1993), and Altruism and Beyond, An Economic Analysis of Transfers and Exchanges Within Families and Groups (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995 and 1999), and is the co-editor of the Handbook of Population and Family Economics (in Handbooks in Economics; Amsterdam: North-Holland 1997, and Beijing: Economic Science Press 2004). Oded Stark is Doctor honoris causa (University of Warsaw), a Humboldt Awardee, and a Presidential Professor of Economics (Poland).
Papers Published in World Economics:
Global Integration and World Migration
This paper explores a theory of migration based upon a number of conjectures about the role of digital media. It proposes that a number of factors including rising use of the internet providing widespread access to global information and an intensified communication between regions and countries brought about, for example, by intensified trade links bring about expansion of people’s social space. This also expands the factors through which they compare their own living standards and social life with others. 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.
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Reasons for Remitting
This article presents a set of reflections on what gives rise to remittances, which constitute a major part of the impact of migration on economic development in the migrants’ own countries. The collage of reasons presented serves to illustrate that remittance behaviour is the outcome of an intricate interplay between the preferences and interests of migrants and their families.
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Losses and Gains to Developing Countries from the Migration of Educated Workers
This paper synthesizes and extends recent research on “The New Economics of the Brain Drain”. In a unified framework, the paper shows that while recently identified adverse repercussions of the brain drain exacerbate the long-recognized negative impact of the brain drain, longer-term consequences turn the brain drain into the harbinger of powerful gains. These gains have been studied already in recent research, or merit attention in future research.
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The New Economics of the Brain Drain
For nearly four decades now, the conventional wisdom has been that the migration of human capital (skilled workers) from a developing country to a developed country is detrimental to the developing country. However, this perception need not hold. A well-designed migration policy can result in a “brain gain” to the developing country rather than in just a “brain drain” from it, as well as in a welfare increase for all of its workers—migrants and non-migrants alike—as the new research reported here suggests.
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