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John Kennan

University of Wisconsin, Madison and National Bureau of Economic Research, USA, and IZA, Germany

IZA World of Labor role

Author

Current position

Richard Meese Professor of Economics, The University of Wisconsin, Madison

Research interest

Bargaining (with applications to labor negotiations and to monetary theory), cyclical employment, wage fluctuations, and migration

Website

http://bit.ly/Kennan_IZApage

Qualifications

PhD Economics, Northwestern University, 1973

Selected publications

  • “The effect of expected income on individual migration decisions.” Econometrica (January 2011) (with J. R. Walker).

  • “Repeated bargaining with persistent private information.” Review of Economic Studies 68 (October 2001): 719–755.

  • “Bargaining with private information.” Journal of Economic Literature (March 1993): 45–104 (with R. Wilson).

article(s)

  • Freedom of movement for workers

    Relaxing immigration restrictions could greatly improve the well-being of people in developing countries, with little effect on wages

    John Kennan, September 2014
    Most developed countries have foreign aid programs that aim to alleviate poverty and foster economic growth in less developed countries, but with very limited success. A large body of evidence indicates that the root of the economic development problem is cross-country differences in the productivity of labor. If workers are much more productive in one country than in another, the obvious way to help people in less developed countries is to allow them to help themselves by moving to places where they can be more productive. Yet immigration laws severely constrain such movement.
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