hands tied on explicit migration policy (because of electoral constraints), they can indirectly manage international migration by fine tuning _ad hoc_ visa provisions in RTAs. Second, when _preferential_ migration policies are prevented, governments may target origin-specific foreign labor force inflows through the inclusion of visa provisions in Regional Trade Agreements.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents the data constructed for estimations and descriptive evidence, section 3 outlines a theoretical framework underlying our econometric analysis. Section 4 presents the empirical strategy. Section 5 presents the baseline results and some heterogeneity analysis. The last section concludes.

# **2 Data and descriptive evidence**

## **2.1 Data**

Our analysis is based on two main data sources. First, we exploit the data made available by the World Bank Handbook of Deep Trade Agreements (Mattoo et al., 2020) – DTA database hereafter. It provides very detailed information on the content of RTAs and therefore highlights the rising role of deep trade agreements (DTAs) in the process of bilateral trade liberalization of countries. DTAs are defined as trade agreements that cover additional policy areas distinct from those directly affecting trade. For instance, DTAs may include provisions regarding international flows of investment and labor, as well as environmental or intellectual property protection provisions - see (Mattoo et al., 2020) for the list of provisions included in trade agreements. The World Bank data set on Deep Trade Agreements provides information on 18 distinct chapters, each of them authored by lead experts. We focus on Chapter 8: Visa and Asylum which assesses " _the presence, depth, and geographical distribution of visa and asylum provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs)_ ". The mapping of ’Visa’ related provisions has been made on the basis of 279 RTAs included in the World Bank’s database.<sup>4</sup> Among them, 100 RTAs include some visa-related provisions.<sup>5</sup> On such a sub-sample of RTAs, a set of 30 binary-choice questions (i.e. categorical variables) have been used to code the specific type of visa-prevision included.<sup>6</sup> The ’Visa’ dummy used in our econometric analysis is therefore equal to one if a trade agreement contains at least one visa related provision, and zero otherwise. Based on the 30 binary-choice questions, we also test the effect of specific types of visa provisions (see next section).

> 4 Database available at: `https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/content-deep-trade-agreements` .

> 5Among the 279 RTAs covered by the DTA database, there might be some agreements, other than the 100 DTAs identified for visa-specific mapping, that contain visa-related provisions. However _"(a) those that contained irrelevant key term hits; (b) PTAs no longer in force (such as the US-Canada PTA, superseded by NAFTA); and, to ensure consistency with other chapters of this Handbook, (c) PTAs that did not appear in the World Bank’s Deep Integration database_ " are not included in the list of 100 RTAs coded for visa-provisions.

> 6Additional details of the coding methodology, as well as the questionnaire are available at: `https://pubdocs. worldbank.org/en/229401607632831170/Chapter-8-Visa-and-Asylum.pdf` .

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