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on Labour Economics |
| By: | Fasani, Francesco; Frattini, Tommaso; Minale, Luigi |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we use repeated cross-sectional survey data to study the labour market performance of refugees across several EU countries and over time. In the first part, we document that labour market outcomes for refugees are consistently worse than those for other comparable migrants. The gap remains sizeable even after controlling for individual characteristics as well as for unobservables using a rich set of fixed effects and interactions between area of origin, entry cohort and destination country. Refugees are 11.6 percent less likely to have a job and 22.1 percent more likely to be unemployed than migrants with similar characteristics. Moreover, their income, occupational quality and labour market participation are also relatively weaker. This gap persists until about 10 years after immigration. In the second part, we assess the role of asylum policies in explaining the observed refugee gap. We conduct a difference-in-differences analysis that exploits the differential timing of dispersal policy enactment across European countries: we show that refugee cohorts exposed to these polices have persistently worse labour market outcomes. Further, we find that entry cohorts admitted when refugee status recognition rates are relatively high integrate better into the host country labour market. |
| Keywords: | Assimilation; asylum policies; asylum seekers; refugee gap |
| JEL: | F22 J15 J61 |
| Date: | 2018–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12718&r=lab |
| By: | Frédéric Docquier (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES), FNRS, National Fund for Scientific Research and FERDI, Fondation pour les Etudes et Recherches sur le Developpement International, France); Riccardo Turati (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)); Jérôme Valette (CERDI, University Clermont Auvergne, CNRS (France)); Chrysovalantis Vasilakis (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES) and Bangor Business School (United Kingdom)) |
| Abstract: | This paper empirically revisits the impact of birthplace diversity on economic growth. We use panel data on US states over the 1960-2010 period. This rich data set allows us to better deal with endogeneity issues and to conduct a large set of robustness checks. Our results suggest that diversity among college-educated immigrants positively affects economic growth. We provide converging evidence pointing at the existence of skill complementarities between workers trained in different countries. These synergies result in better labor market outcomes for native workers and in higher productivity in the R&D sector. The gains from diversity are maximized when immigrants originate from economically or culturally distant countries (but not both), and when they acquired part of their secondary education abroad and their college education in the US. Overall, a 10% increase in high-skilled diversity raises GDP per capita by about 6%. On the contrary, low-skilled diversity has insignificant effects. |
| Keywords: | Immigration, Culture, Birthplace Diversity, Growth |
| JEL: | F22 J61 |
| Date: | 2018–02–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctl:louvir:2018004&r=lab |
| By: | Elias, Ferran; Monras, Joan; Vázquez Grenno, Javier |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the consequences of the legalization of around 600,000 immigrants by the unexpectedly elected Spanish government of Zapatero following the terrorist attacks of March 2004 (Montalvo, 2011). Using detailed data from payroll-tax revenues, we estimate that each newly legalized immigrant increased local payroll-tax revenues by 4,189 euros on average. This estimate is only 55 percent of what we would have expected from the size of the influx of newly documented immigrants, which suggests that newly legalized immigrants probably earned lower wages than other workers and maybe affected the labor-market outcomes of those other workers. We estimate that the policy change deteriorated the labor-market outcomes of some low-skilled natives and immigrants and improved the outcomes of high-skilled natives and immigrants. This led some low-skilled immigrants to move away from high-immigrant locations. Correcting for internal migration and selection, we obtain that each newly legalized immigrant increased payroll-tax revenues by 4,801 euros, or 15 percent more than the estimates from local raw payroll-tax revenue data. This shows the importance of looking both at public revenue data and the labor market to understand the consequences of amnesty programs fully. |
| Keywords: | Immigration; public policy; undocumented immigrants |
| JEL: | F22 J31 J61 R11 |
| Date: | 2018–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12726&r=lab |
| By: | Wapler, Rüdiger (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany]); Wolf, Katja (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany]); Wolff, Joachim (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany]) |
| Abstract: | "While many studies estimated the effects of active labour market programmes (ALMPs) on the participants' labour market outcomes, much fewer studies are concerned with effects of these policies on the regional matching-process between job seekers and vacancies. An essential part of many reforms of the unemployment benefit system such as in Germany intended to activate unemployed job-seekers through an intense use of ALMPs. Therefore, it is crucial to understand whether such policies can improve the matching efficiency. We analyse quarterly panel data of German job centres in the period 2006 to 2011 and estimate the effects of the most important ALMPs on the regional exit rate from job-seeking into regular employment in a matching-function framework by applying the system generalized methods of moments estimator. Our results point to positive effects on the matching efficiency of a number of ALMPs, but the effects partly differ between high and low unemployment regions. Only for a few programmes does our evidence point to no or negative effects on the matching efficiency and this may be related to the implementation of these programmes on a very large scale." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en)) |
| JEL: | C23 H43 J64 J68 |
| Date: | 2018–03–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iab:iabdpa:201808&r=lab |
| By: | Jaeger, David A; Ruist, Joakim; Stuhler, Jan |
| Abstract: | A large literature exploits geographic variation in the concentration of immigrants to identify their impact on a variety of outcomes. To address the endogeneity of immigrants' location choices, the most commonly-used instrument interacts national inflows by country of origin with immigrants' past geographic distribution. We present evidence that estimates based on this "shift-share" instrument conflate the short- and long-run responses to immigration shocks. If the spatial distribution of immigrant inflows is stable over time, the instrument is likely to be correlated with ongoing responses to previous supply shocks. Estimates based on the conventional shift-share instrument are therefore unlikely to identify the short-run causal effect. We propose a "multiple instrumentation" procedure that isolates the spatial variation arising from changes in the country-of-origin composition at the national level and permits us to estimate separately the short- and long-run effects. Our results are a cautionary tale for a large body of empirical work, not just on immigration, that rely on shift-share instruments for causal inference. |
| Keywords: | Immigration; past settlement instrument; shift-share instrument; spatial correlation |
| JEL: | C36 J15 J21 J61 |
| Date: | 2018–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12701&r=lab |
| By: | Hamish Low (University of Cambridge); Costas Meghir (Yale University); Luigi Pistaferri (Stanford University); Alessandra Voena (The University of Chicago) |
| Abstract: | The 1996 PRWORA reform introduced time limits on the receipt of welfare in the United States. We use variation by state and across demographic groups to provide reduced form evidence showing that such limits led to a fall in welfare claims (partly due to "banking" benefits for future use), a rise in employment, and a decline in divorce rates. We then specify and estimate a life-cycle model of marriage, labor supply and divorce under limited commitment to better understand the mechanisms behind these behavioral responses, carry out counterfactual analysis with longer run impacts and evaluate the welfare effects of the program. Based on the model, which reproduces the reduced form estimates, we show that among low educated women, instead of relying on TANF, single mothers work more, more mothers remain married, some move to relying only on food stamps and, in ex-ante welfare terms, women are worse off. |
| Keywords: | time limits, welfare reform, life-cycle, marriage and divorce |
| JEL: | D91 H53 J12 J21 |
| Date: | 2018–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hka:wpaper:2018-012&r=lab |
| By: | Drahs, Sascha (DIW Berlin); Haywood, Luke (DIW Berlin); Schiprowski, Amelie (IZA Bonn and DIW Berlin) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes how subjective expectations about wage opportunities influence the job search decision. We match data on subjective wage expectations with administrative employment records. The data reveal that unemployed individuals over-estimate their future net re-employment wage by 10% on average. In particular, the average individual does not anticipate that wage offers decline in value with their elapsed time out of em- ployment. How does this optimism affect job finding? We analyze this question using a structural job search framework in which subjective expectations about future wage offers are not constrained to be consistent with reality. Results show that wage optimism has highly dynamic effects: upon unemployment entry, optimism decreases job finding by about 8%. This effect weakens over the unemployment spell and eventually switches sign after about 8 months of unemployment. From then onward, optimism prevents un- employed individuals from becoming discouraged and thus increases search. On average, optimism increases the duration of unemployment by about 6.5%. |
| Keywords: | job search; subjective expectations; structural estimation; |
| JEL: | J64 D83 |
| Date: | 2018–03–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rco:dpaper:75&r=lab |
| By: | Peter, Noemi (Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen); Lundborg, Petter (Department of Economics, Lund University); Mikkelsen, Sara (Department of Economics, Lund University); Webbink, Dinand (Erasmus School of Economics, Rotterdam) |
| Abstract: | We examine how the gender of a sibling affects earnings, education and family formation. Identification is complicated by parental preferences: if parents prefer certain sex compositions over others, children's gender affects not only the outcomes of other children but also the existence of potential additional children. We employ two empirical strategies that both address this problem. First, we look at a sample of dizygotic (i.e. non-identical) twins. Second, we use a large sample of singletons to estimate whether first-borns are affected by the gender of their second-born sibling. We find that a same-sex sibling increases men's earnings and family formation outcomes (marriage and number of children), as compared to an opposite-sex sibling. Women with a same-sex sibling also earn more and are somewhat more likely to form a family in the singleton sample. A large part of the positive effect on men's income can be explained by competition among brothers. Women on the other hand seem to benefit from sisters because of shared labor market networks. The effects on family formation might stem from differential parental treatment for men, and from competition between sisters for women. |
| Keywords: | sibling gender; sex composition; twins; income; schooling; fertility |
| JEL: | J00 J13 J16 J24 |
| Date: | 2018–02–26 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2018_003&r=lab |