Portuguese emigration 1958-1985: some empirical evidence

"Supplying work in the home country or abroad must be seen as the result of the same decisional process. If that is true, the same set of variables should be used to explain the participation in the labor market and the emigration rates. Based upon empirical results [for Portuguese emigrants], we discuss some of the traditional conclusions of the economic literature. Our empirical results, for example, show that: (1) there is...strong support for considering home wages and the wages in the country of destination asymmetrically, (2) imperfections in the capital markets seem to play an important role when workers must pay for their moving expenses and (3) there is a differential in coefficients between the period before 1974 and after that date, as 1974 is the year most of the Central European countries changed their immigration policies."