The size of the cliff at the border

The scale of international migration flows depends on moving costs that are, in turn, influenced by host-country policies. This paper shows how to estimate the influence of policies upon bilateral migration flows to multiple destinations. We rely on a Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator to derive estimates that are consistent under more general distributional assumptions on the underlying RUM model than the ones commonly adopted in the literature. We derive bounds for the estimated direct and indirect effects of migration policies that reflect the uncertainty connected to the use of aggregate data, and we show that bilateral migration flows can be highly sensitive to the immigration policies set by other destination countries, an externality that we are able to quantify ; This research was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche of the French government through the program “Investissements d'avenir” (ANR-10-LABX-14-01) and by the FERDI (Fondation pour les études et recherches sur le développement international). Jesús Fernández-Huertas Moraga received financial support from the ECO2008-04785 and ECO2012-39412 projects funded by the Spanish Ministry for Economics and Competitiveness