International migration represents a potential channel for the transmission of norms, attitudes, and values back to the home countries. In this paper, we explore how international migration affects tax morale and aversion to the free-riding of members of the household left behind in the home country. We use a rich longitudinal household-level database on Polish society (period 2007–2015) that allows us to observe social attitudes and values of individuals before and after the actual migration of a member of the household. We find that having a migrant in the household has a significant and positive effect on tax morale and increases aversion toward free-riding of stayers. We also find that migrants have a lower level of tax morale before departure compared to stayers, suggesting that international migration leads to an overall gain in pro-social behaviors.

Membership in the monetary union imposes higher demands on factor market flexibility, since neither the exchange rate nor monetary policies can be used to deal with country-specific shocks. In this paper we assess the ability of the twelve new EU member states (NMS-12) to dampen the impact of shocks by means of macroeconomic wage flexibility. Following the structural VAR approach elaborated in Moore and Pentecost (2006), real wage flexibility is measured by the responsiveness of real wages to real (permanent) and nominal (temporary) shocks. The analysis of Moore and Pentecost (2006) is extended in three ways: by employing a new Eurostat labour cost data set covering 1996Q1 to 2007Q3, by using a large sample of 24 EU member countries, and by assessing the sensitivity of the results to the sample length. We find evidence of heterogeneous real wage adjustment across the new as well as the mature EU economies. Overall, the degree of real wage flexibility in the NMS-12 lies within the bounds of the corresponding values for the Euro Area ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ member countries.