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on Economics of Human Migration |
| By: | Allison Shertzer; Randall P. Walsh |
| Abstract: | Residential segregation by race grew sharply in the United States as black migrants from the South arrived in northern cities during the early twentieth century. The existing literature emphasizes discriminatory institutions as the driving force behind this rapid rise in segregation. Using newly assembled neighborhood-level data, we instead focus on the role of “flight” by whites, providing the first systematic evidence of the role that prewar population dynamics played in the emergence of the American ghetto. Leveraging exogenous changes in neighborhood racial composition, we show that white departures in response to black arrivals were quantitatively large and accelerated between 1900 and 1930. Our preferred estimates suggest that white flight was responsible for 34 percent of the increase in segregation over the 1910s and 50 percent over the 1920s. Our analysis suggests that segregation would likely have arisen in American cities even without the presence of discriminatory institutions as a direct consequence of the widespread and decentralized relocation decisions of white urban residents. |
| JEL: | J15 N32 R23 |
| Date: | 2016–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22077&r=mig |
| By: | Steinmayr, Andreas (University of Munich) |
| Abstract: | An important concern about the surge in the number of arriving refugees in Europe is increased support for far-right, nationalist, anti-immigration parties. This paper studies a natural experiment in an Austrian state to identify the causal effect of exposure to refugees in the neighborhood on the support for the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPOE). In the state elections in September 2015 the FPOE doubled its vote share with a fierce anti-asylum campaign. Since only 42 percent of Upper Austrian communities hosted refugees at the time of the election, direct exposure to refugees varied at the local level. To account for the potential endogeneity in the distribution of refugees, I use pre-existing group accommodations as instrumental variable. To cope with the sudden inflow of large numbers of refugees, these buildings were used for refugee accommodation and thus strongly increase the probability of refugee presence in the community. In line with the contact hypothesis I find that hosting refugees in the community dampens the positive overall trend and decreases FPOE support by 4.42 percentage points in state elections. Further analysis using exit poll data reveals a positive effect on the optimism in the population that the integration of refugees can be managed. Placebo tests show that there were no effects in elections prior to 2015. |
| Keywords: | immigration, refugees, political economy, voting |
| JEL: | D72 J15 P16 |
| Date: | 2016–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9790&r=mig |
| By: | Michel Beine (CREA, Université du Luxembourg); Bénédicte Souy (CREA, Université du Luxembourg) |
| Abstract: | This article presents and discusses the evolution of immigration policy of Luxembourg concerning the entry of economic, family related and humanitarian migrants. To that aim, we rely on some of the data of the IMPALA project that codes from immigration laws the entry conditions in a set of immigration countries. We focus on some entry tracks specific to skilled and unskilled migrants and compare some of the conditions prevailing in Luxembourg with those observed in France, the US and Australia. We also propose a narrative analysis of the changes in the Luxembourgish regulation since the end of the 19th Century. We show that Luxembourg has improved its immigration system over time and follows mainly reforms introduced in the other European countries and at the European level. |
| Keywords: | IMPALA project, Immigration policy, Asylum policy, Luxembourgish regulation |
| JEL: | K F22 J08 J61 |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:luc:wpaper:16-02&r=mig |
| By: | Clemens, Michael A. (Center for Global Development); Montenegro, Claudio (University of Chile); Pritchett, Lant (Harvard Kennedy School) |
| Abstract: | Large international differences in the price of labor can be sustained by differences between workers, or by natural and policy barriers to worker mobility. We use migrant selection theory and evidence to place lower bounds on the ad valorem equivalent of labor mobility barriers to the United States, with unique nationally-representative microdata on both U.S. immigrant workers and workers in their 42 home countries. The average price equivalent of migration barriers in this setting, for low-skill males, is greater than $13,700 per worker per year. Natural and policy barriers may each create annual global losses of trillions of dollars. |
| Keywords: | migration, growth, impact, GDP, tariff, quota, deadweight, cost, visa, barrier, price, wedge |
| JEL: | F22 J61 J71 O15 |
| Date: | 2016–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9789&r=mig |
| By: | Bahar, Dany (Inter-American Development Bank); Rapoport, Hillel (Paris School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | Do migrants shape the dynamic comparative advantage of their sending and receiving countries? To answer this question we study the drivers of knowledge diffusion by looking at the dynamics of the export basket of countries, with particular focus on migration. The fact that knowledge diffusion requires direct human interaction implies that the international diffusion of knowledge should follow the pattern of international migration. This is what this paper documents. Our main finding is that migration, and particularly skilled immigration, is a strong and robust driver of productive knowledge diffusion as measured by the appearance and growth of tradable goods in the migrants' receiving and sending countries. We find that a 10% increase in the stock of immigrants from countries exporters of a given product is associated with a 2% increase in the likelihood that the host country will start exporting that good "from scratch" in the following 10-year period. In terms of ability to expand the export basket of countries, a migrant with college education or above is about ten times more "effective" than an unskilled migrant. The results are robust to accounting for shifts in product-specific global demand, to excluding bilateral trade possibly generated by network effects, as well as to instrumenting for migration using a gravity model. |
| Keywords: | migration, knowledge diffusion, comparative advantage, exports |
| JEL: | F14 F22 O33 D83 |
| Date: | 2016–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9788&r=mig |
| By: | George J. Borjas |
| Abstract: | The Department of Homeland Security estimates that 11.4 million undocumented persons reside in the United States. Congress and President Obama are considering a number of proposals to regularize the status of the undocumented population and provide a “path to citizenship.” Any future change in the immigration status of this group is bound to have significant effects on the labor market, on the number of persons that qualify for various government-provided benefits, on the timing of retirement, on the size of the population receiving Social Security benefits, and on the funding of almost all of these government programs. This paper provides a comprehensive empirical study of the labor supply behavior of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Using newly developed methods that attempt to identify undocumented status for foreign-born persons sampled in the Current Population Surveys, the empirical analysis documents a number of findings, including the fact that the work propensity of undocumented men is much larger than that of other groups in the population; that this gap has grown over the past two decades; and that the labor supply elasticity of undocumented men is very close to zero, suggesting that their labor supply is almost perfectly inelastic. |
| JEL: | J22 J6 |
| Date: | 2016–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22102&r=mig |
| By: | Dalvai, Wilfried |
| Abstract: | This paper models the migration of the Creative Class (Florida, 2003) in a New-Economic-Geography framework. Beside wage differentials, urban cultural amenities play an important role on the choice of location. A public cultural good, financed by taxes, is introduced as an agglomeration force. The public-good is purely consumed by skilled workers. Additionally urban cultural diversity across cities is taken into account to model exogenous differences between cities. I analyze the political equilibrium of tax competition. Furthermore the effects of asymmetries of cities and trade liberalization is examined. There is an optimal level of provision of public cultural goods. In the dispersion-scenario the equilibrium tax rate for workers is hump-shaped with respect to trade integration while for skilled workers it is u-shaped. In the core-periphery scenario the equilibrium tax rate for the core decreases with increasing trade freeness. |
| Keywords: | Creative Class,New Economic Geography,Agglomeration,Urban Cultural Amenities,Public Cultural Goods,Tax Competition |
| JEL: | F12 H87 J24 R1 |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:roswps:143&r=mig |
| By: | Huang, Xiaobing; Liu, Xiaolian |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the nexus between consumption and social integration of Chinese migrant workers using survey data with 869 samples from four Chinese provinces. The study suggests the following results: (1) Migrant workers are less integrated in terms of psychological integration and cultural integration, but they are strongly motivated to integrate into host societies; (2) An increase in consumption is associated with an increase in the social integration of migrant workers. This effect is stronger for new-generation migrant workers and weaker for high-income migrant workers; (3) Entertainment consumption plays the most important role in the social integration of migrant workers, whereas the effect of housing consumption on social integration is found to be negative; (4) Among all types of consumption behaviors, rational consumption is beneficial to the social integration of migrant workers, whereas impulsive consumption is harmful. The effects of economic consumption and conspicuous consumption are not significant. |
| Keywords: | consumption,consumption behavior,migrant workers,social integration |
| JEL: | F22 J15 D73 K42 |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:ifwedp:201611&r=mig |
| By: | Coxhead, Ian; Vu, Linh; Nguyen, Cuong |
| Abstract: | We investigate determinants of individual migration decisions in Vietnam, a country with increasingly high levels of geographical labor mobility. Using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) of 2012, we find that probability of migration is strongly associated with individual, household and community-level characteristics. The probability of migration is higher for young people and those with post-secondary education. Migrants are more likely to be from households with better-educated household heads, female-headed households, and households with higher youth dependency ratios. Members of ethnic minority groups are much less likely to migrate, other things equal. Using multinomial logit methods, we distinguish migration by broad destination, and find that those moving to Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi have broadly similar characteristics and drivers of migration to those moving to other destinations. We also use VHLSS 2012 together with VHLSS 2010, which allows us to focus on a narrow cohort of recent migrants—those present in the household in 2010, but who have moved away by 2012. This yields much tighter results. For education below upper secondary school, the evidence on positive selection by education is much stronger. However, the ethnic minority “penalty” on spatial labor mobility remains strong and significant, even after controlling for specific characteristics of households and communes. This lack of mobility is a leading candidate to explain the distinctive persistence of poverty among Vietnam’s ethnic minority populations, even as national poverty has sharply diminished. |
| Keywords: | Migration, migration decision, remittances, household survey, Vietnam. |
| JEL: | I0 O1 R2 |
| Date: | 2016–03–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:70217&r=mig |
| By: | Liu, Huju; Picot, Garnett; Green, David; Ostrovsky, Yuri |
| Abstract: | Le present document fournit pour la premiere fois un apercu de la propriete d?entreprises par les immigrants, ainsi que de la creation d?emplois qui en decoule au Canada. Cette recherche est possible en raison d?un nouvel ensemble de donnees qui a ete cree et dans lequel le statut d?immigrant des proprietaires d?entreprises peut etre determine. L?analyse est axee sur deux types d?entreprises : les entreprises privees constituees en societe et les travailleurs autonomes non constitues en societe . Les resultats sont presentes pour les immigrants qui sont arrives au Canada depuis 1980 et qui se trouvaient au pays en 2010, qui sont simplement designes ci-apres comme des immigrants au Canada. En outre, on suit deux cohortes d?entree d?immigrants, afin de determiner leur trajectoire en ce qui a trait a la propriete d?entreprises au cours des cinq a dix premieres annees passees au Canada. |
| Keywords: | Business ownership, Business performance and ownership, Ethnic diversity and immigration, Labour, Labour market and income, Workplace organization, innovation, performance |
| Date: | 2016–03–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:stc:stcp3f:2016375f&r=mig |