External recruitment is often believed to be harmful in that it trades off the need for outside talents with the incentives of inside workers. This article shows that, even from an incentive viewpoint, external recruitment has its powerful function. Specifically, if promotion is based on relative performance, then negative activities (sabotages) are a valuable instrument for competition. This results in inefficiency of the firm. External recruitment, by reducing the marginal return of negative effort relative to that of productive effort, restores the incentives in productive activity. Even without sabotage concern, external recruitment can avoid shirking equilibrium or prevent workers’ collusion.

This article proposes a formal model of migration in which workers are heterogeneous and markets are stochastically correlated. We derive and characterize the optimal migration pattern of a family. We show that migration can take place even when migrants earn less abroad and, surprisingly, when earnings in the foreign country are riskier for every member of the family. Moreover, it may well be an optimal arrangement to have only dependents migrate, thus rationalizing the recent dependent‐oriented migration flows from places like Hong Kong and Taiwan. We provide some evidence in support of our theory.