On the invitation of Prof. Barry Chiswick, Chair of the Department of Economics, Martin Kahanec spoke about whether and how free mobility of labor may have helped an enlarged EU to cope with asymmetric shocks during the Great Recession at the Elliott School of International Affairs of the George Washington University in Washington, DC, on October 1, 2014.

Two days later, on October 3, 2014, he was hosted by Prof. Ira N. Gang at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he gave the same talk.

Kahanec specifically focused on how institutional factors – EU enlargement and labor market access – affected the mobility of workers and hence EU’s capacity to absorb asymmetric economic shocks and whether post-enlargement migration flows responded to economic shocks.

The paper on which the presentation was based is downloadable here http://ftp.iza.org/dp8456.pdf