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on Economics of Human Migration |
| By: | Dominique Lemmermann; Regina T. Riphahn |
| Abstract: | We investigate the causal effect of age at migration on subsequent educational attainment in the destination country. To identify the causal effect we compare the educational attainment of siblings at age 21, exploiting the fact that they typically migrate at different ages within a given family. We consider several education outcomes conditional on family fixed effects. We take advantage of long running and detailed data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, which entails an oversample of immigrants and provides information on language skills. We find significant effects of age at migration on educational attainment and a critical age of migration around age 6. The educational attainment of female immigrants responds more strongly to a high age at immigration than that of males. |
| Keywords: | immigration, education, integration, school attainment, Germany, causal estimation, family fixed effect |
| JEL: | I21 J61 C21 |
| Date: | 2016–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bav:wpaper:166_lemmermannriphahn&r=mig |
| By: | Murard, Elie (IZA) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the effect of international migration on the welfare of family members left behind at the origin. Previous literature has produced inconclusive evidence, with some studies suggesting that migration reduces income poverty while others show that non-migrants bear a larger work burden to compensate for the loss of migrants' earnings. This paper provides a new unified framework that generates testable predictions of whether migration increases non-migrants' welfare in terms of both consumption and leisure time. Drawing on household panel data in rural Mexico, I find that migration increases non-migrants' consumption, but that this consumption gain cannot be explained by labor supply adjustments. Migration improves left-behinds' welfare through two different channels: (i) migrants' remittances exceed their forgone income contribution to the origin household; and (ii) the out-migration of a farmer increases the marginal productivity of agricultural labor for those left behind in the farm. |
| Keywords: | migration, remittances, welfare, labor supply, consumption, Mexico |
| JEL: | J22 F22 |
| Date: | 2016–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10305&r=mig |
| By: | Paolo Abarcar |
| Abstract: | What is the value of return migrants and the foreign experience they bring to domestic employers? This paper describes an experiment conducted in the Philippines, in which over 8,000 fictitious resumes were randomly assigned varying lengths of foreign work experience and were sent to online job ads. |
| Keywords: | return migration, foreign work experience, international migrants, resume-audit study, employers, location-specific human capital |
| JEL: | F Z J |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mpr:mprres:f8bc567166f04bbeb7f0c831bf54e6d5&r=mig |
| By: | Aslan Zorlu (University of Amsterdam, IZA, NIMA); Ruben van Gaalen (Statistics Netherlands) |
| Abstract: | This study examines ethnic differences in leaving home and the choice of destination accommodation. Using unique individual administrative panel data, we study the mobility of the entire birth cohort 1983 living in the Netherlands. In contrast to previous studies, this paper includes the geographical location and quality of destination living arrangement in the analysis in an attempt to explain ethnic differences in parental home leaving. We show that ethnic minority youth, in particular Turkish and Moroccan young adults, improve their housing quality when leaving the parental home. This improvement clearly outweighs the effects of more family-oriented attitudes among Turkish and Moroccan households resulting in even earlier home-leaving than youth of Dutch origin. Our results on the early home leaving behaviour of ethnic minority youth are robust with regard to the geographical distance of nest-leavers from the parental home. |
| Keywords: | migrants, transition to adulthood, housing quality, location choice |
| Date: | 2016–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nim:nimawp:63/2016&r=mig |
| By: | Ortega, Javier (City University London); Verdugo, Gregory (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) |
| Abstract: | Exploiting a large French panel for 1976-2007, we examine the impact of low-educated immigration on the labour market outcomes of blue-collar natives initially in jobs where immigrants became overrepresented in the last decades. Immigrant inflows generate substantial reallocations of natives across locations and occupations. Location movers are negatively selected while occupation movers are positively selected and move towards better paid-jobs characterised by less routine tasks. As a result, controlling for composition effects has an important quantitative impact on the estimated effects of immigration. Low-educated immigration generally lowers the wages of blue-collar workers, but its impact is heterogeneous across sectors. |
| Keywords: | immigration, wages, employment |
| JEL: | J15 J31 |
| Date: | 2016–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10303&r=mig |
| By: | Biavaschi, Costanza (University of Reading); Burzyński, Michał (University of Luxembourg); Elsner, Benjamin (IZA); Machado, Joel (University of Luxembourg) |
| Abstract: | High-skilled workers are four times more likely to migrate than low-skilled workers. This skill bias in migration – often called brain drain – has been at the center of a heated debate about the welfare consequences of emigration from developing countries. In this paper, we provide a global perspective on the brain drain by jointly quantifying its impact on the sending and receiving countries. In a calibrated multi-country model, we compare the current world to a counterfactual with the same number of migrants, but those migrants are randomly selected from their country of origin. We find that the skill bias in migration significantly increases welfare in most receiving countries. Moreover, due to a more efficient global allocation of talent, the global welfare effect is positive, albeit some sending countries lose. Overall, our findings suggest that more – not less – high-skilled migration would increase world welfare. |
| Keywords: | migration, brain drain, global welfare |
| JEL: | F22 O15 J61 |
| Date: | 2016–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10275&r=mig |
| By: | Comino, Stefano (University of Udine); Mastrobuoni, Giovanni (University of Essex); Nicolò, Antonio (University of Padua) |
| Abstract: | We analyze the consequences of illegally residing in a country on the likelihood of reporting a crime to the police and, as a consequence, on the likelihood to become victims of a crime. We use an immigration amnesty to address two issues when dealing with the legal status of immigrants: it is both endogenous as well as mostly unobserved in surveys. Right after the 1986 US Immigration Reform and Control Act, which disproportionately legalized individuals of Hispanic origin, crime victims of Hispanic origin in cities with a large proportion of illegal Hispanics become considerably more likely to report a crime. Non-Hispanics show no changes. Difference-in-differences estimates that adjust for the misclassification of legal status imply that the reporting rate of undocumented immigrants is close to 11 percent. Gaining legal status the reporting rate triples, approaching the reporting rate of non-Hispanics. We also find some evidence that following the amnesty Hispanics living in metropolitan areas with a large share of illegal migrants experience a reduction in victimization. This is coherent with a simple behavioral model of crime that guides our empirical strategies, where amnesties increase the reporting rate of legalized immigrants, which, in turn, modify the victimization of natives and migrants. |
| Keywords: | immigration, amnesty, crime reporting, victimization survey |
| JEL: | J15 K37 K42 R23 |
| Date: | 2016–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10306&r=mig |
| By: | Paolo Pinotti (Bocconi University) |
| Abstract: | We estimate the e ect of immigrant legalization on the crime rate of immigrants in Italy by exploiting an ideal regression discontinuity design: fixed quotas of residence permits are available each year, applications must be submitted electronically on specific 'Click Days', and are processed on a first-come, first-served basis until the available quotas are exhausted. Matching data on applications with individual- level criminal records, we show that legalization reduces the crime rate of legalized immigrants by 0.6 percentage points on average, on a baseline crime rate of 1.1 percent. |
| Keywords: | legal status, crime, regression discontinuity design |
| JEL: | J61 K37 K42 |
| Date: | 2016–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:1625&r=mig |
| By: | Guillaume Daudin (PSL, Université Paris-Dauphine, LEDa-DIAL UMR IRD 225); Raphaël Franck (Bar Ilan University, Department of Economics, 52900 Ramat Gan, Israel, and Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Economics at Brown University, Providence 02912 RI, USA.); Hillel Rapoport (Paris School of Economics, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) |
| Abstract: | France experienced the demographic transition before richer and more educated countries. This paper offers a novel explanation for this puzzle that emphasizes the diffusion of culture and information through internal migration. It tests how migration affected fertility by building a decennial bilateral migration matrix between French regions for 1861-1911. The identification strategy uses exogenous variation in transportation costs resulting from the construction of railways. The results suggest the convergence towards low birth rates can be explained by the diffusion of low-fertility norms by migrants, especially by migrants to and from Paris. |
| Keywords: | Fertility, France, Demographic Transition, Migration. |
| JEL: | J13 N33 O15 |
| Date: | 2016–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dia:wpaper:dt201606&r=mig |
| By: | Giuntella, Osea (University of Oxford); Mazzonna, Fabrizio (USI Università della Svizzera Italiana); Nicodemo, Catia (University of Oxford); Vargas-Silva, Carlos (University of Oxford) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the effects of immigration on the allocation of occupational physical burden and work health risks. Using data for England and Wales from the Labour Force Survey, we find that, on average, immigration leads to a reallocation of UK-born workers towards jobs characterized by lower physical intensity and injury risk. The results also show important differences across skill groups. Immigration reduces the average physical burden of UK-born workers with medium levels of education, but has no significant effect on those with low levels. |
| Keywords: | immigration, labor-market, physical burden, work-related injuries, health |
| JEL: | J61 I10 |
| Date: | 2016–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10304&r=mig |
| By: | Christian Dustmann (University College London and CReAM); Uta Schönberg (University College London and CReAM); Jan Stuhler (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) |
| Abstract: | We classify the empirical literature on the wage impact of immigration into three groups, where studies in the first two estimate different relative effects, and the third the total effect of immigration on wages. We interpret the estimates obtained from the different approaches through the lens of the canonical model to demonstrate that they are not comparable. We then relax two key assumptions in this literature, allowing for inelastic and heterogeneous labor supply elasticities of natives and the downgrading of immigrants. We show that heterogeneous labor supply elasticities, if ignored, may complicate the interpretation of wage estimates, in particular of relative wage effects. Moreover, downgrading may lead to biased estimates in those approaches that estimate relative effects of immigration, but not in approaches that estimate total effects. We conclude that empirical models that estimate total effects not only answer important policy questions, but are also more robust to alternative assumptions than models that estimate relative effects. |
| Keywords: | Immigration, impact, wage effects |
| JEL: | J21 J23 J24 J31 J61 |
| Date: | 2016–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:1626&r=mig |
| By: | Aslan Zorlu (University of Amsterdam, IZA, NIMA) |
| Abstract: | Admission and geographic distribution of asylum seekers has a central place in public discourse in Western countries, amid mounting asylum applications and dire humanitarian crises. Receiving countries usually distribute the newly arriving asylum seekers across the entire country, in particular in small remote communities. Incidental opposition actions by local residents against the siting of Asylum Seeker Centers (ASC) has created the perception of strong and widespread resistance in the public sphere. This paper aims to assess this alleged backlash by examining attitudes toward asylum seekers in small local communities. Using data from three representative surveys conducted among residents in the vicinity of four ASCs in the Netherlands, the regression analysis shows a strikingly high willingness to host an ASC, which stands in opposition to popularly assumed public opinion. |
| Keywords: | reception of asylum seekers, attitudes, immigrants, local communities |
| Date: | 2016–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nim:nimawp:62/2016&r=mig |
| By: | Andersson Joona, Pernilla (SOFI, Stockholm University); Lanninger, Alma W. (SOFI, Stockholm University); Sundström, Marianne (SOFI, Stockholm University) |
| Abstract: | In this paper we evaluate the Swedish Establishment Reform, carried out in 2010 with the goal of speeding up the establishment of refugees and their family. From December 1, 2010 the reform transferred the responsibility for the integration of newly‐arrived refugees from the municipalities to the government funded Public Employment Service through which those eligible should get establishment talks, individual plans and coaches. The Reform was motivated by concern over the low employment level and slow integration of refugees. Our approach is to compare the outcomes of the Treatment group, which took part in establishment activities and arrived between December 1, 2010 and December 31, 2011, to those of the Comparison group, which arrived in the eleven months preceding the Reform and participated in municipal introduction programs, controlling for a rich set of observables, including country of birth and month of residence permit. Outcomes are measured in terms of employment and earnings in 2012, 2013 and 2014 for the Treatment group and in 2011, 2012 and 2013 for the Comparison group. Our data comes from registers held by Statistics Sweden and covers all immigrants. The results suggest positive and significant effects of the Reform. In the second year after program‐start the Treatment group had about 5.7 percent higher probability of employment and in the third year about 7.5 percent higher. The effects on earnings were larger, about 20 percent higher earnings for the Treatment group after the second year and about 22 percent higher after the third year. |
| Keywords: | integration, refugees, labor market policy, treatment effect, employment, earnings, caseworkers |
| JEL: | J15 J61 J68 |
| Date: | 2016–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10307&r=mig |