Why Countries Sign Bilateral Labor Agreements
利用1945至2015年间582个双边劳工协议的数据，检验了标准解释（东道国更富裕且更专制）是否成立，发现仅适用于中东国家，且签署协议的国家移民流量更大。
Countries have entered into several hundred bilateral labor agreements (BLAs), which control the conditions under which source countries send migrant workers to host countries. What has not been fully explained or empirically tested is why countries would sign these agreements. We conduct a statistical examination of these agreements using an original data set of 582 BLAs entered into from 1945 to 2015. We find that the standard explanation for BLAs—that they are likely to be formed when potential host countries are dramatically wealthier and more repressive than potential source countries—is true for host countries in the Middle East, but this pattern does not hold for other countries that have formed BLAs. We also find evidence that countries that enter into BLAs experience greater migration flows than countries that do not, though we are not able to verify that the BLAs cause this difference.