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on Economics of Human Migration |
| By: | Sak, Güven; Kaymaz, Timur; Kadkoy, Omar; Kenanoglu, Murat |
| Abstract: | In 2015, worldwide forced displacement was at its highest recorded level, surpassing 65 million. Out of this number, nearly 20 million people are those who fled their countries of origin to seek refuge in third countries. International responsibility sharing in terms of hosting the historical levels of refugee flows has so far been inadequate. Today, lowerand upper-middle income countries host 65 percent of the world's refugees, mostly in urban settings. Whereas refugee camps provide access to basic needs such as shelter, food and healthcare, displaced individuals living in urban settings have to sustain their needs through their own means. In turn, this requires access to labour market. To facilitate formal labour market integration of refugees in host countries, the authors call on G20 to mobilize the private sector in developing sustainable solutions for the global refugee crisis, endorse a "Virtual Observatory for Refugee Integration" to be operated by the participation of domestic policy think tanks in refugee hosting countries to monitor and to advocate private sector based policies for the integration of refugees around the world, and encourage its members and host communities to initiate startup visa programmes for refugees. |
| Keywords: | Refugees,labour market,integration and entrepreneurship |
| JEL: | J15 J61 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:ifwedp:201761&r=mig |
| By: | Freddi, Eleonora (Tilburg University, Center For Economic Research) |
| Abstract: | Combining click data from a Swedish newspaper and administrative data on asylum seekers in Sweden, I examine whether a larger presence of refugees in a municipality induces people to avoid news that may encourage welcoming the newcomers. Exploiting the unexpected inflow of refugees to Sweden during 2015 and their exogenous allocation across Swedish municipalities, I find that people living in municipalities where the relative number of refugees has been larger read fewer articles about asylum seekers. I then identify articles that may raise feelings of compassion towards the refugees. The decrease in information acquisition is 36 larger for such empathic articles. |
| Keywords: | information avoidance; refugee crisis; motivated beliefs; click data |
| JEL: | A13 D64 D83 J15 L82 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tiu:tiucen:ee7c017f-1996-47d3-9d73-2f83695e2b95&r=mig |
| By: | Yuriko Takahashi (Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University) |
| Abstract: | This research note provides a tentative analysis of the causes and consequences of Mexico’s political-electoral reform in 2014 with a special focus on the extension of voting rights to Mexicans living abroad. The reform significantly modified the rules and procedures for electing and forming a government in Mexico. Specifically, I am presenting the following arguments. Democratization via increasing electoral competition promoted the reform of extending voting rights abroad as a way of enhancing the democratic representation of Mexican migrants in foreign countries. On the other hand, the usage of postal and internet voting in a context of weak monitoring mechanisms entails the risk of “exporting” clientelism beyond borders, because politicians may have a greater incentive to cultivate support from migrants to survive competitive elections. Since clientelism erodes electoral integrity, the reform of voting rights in Mexico, which was driven by increasing electoral competition, is a double-edged sword. Based on primary and secondary sources, I provide partial evidence to support these claims and propose a viable empirical strategy to rigorously verify the validity of them. |
| Keywords: | clientelism, substantive voting rights, Mexico, democratization, voting rights abroad, the 2014 political-electoral reform |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wap:wpaper:1618&r=mig |
| By: | Ci, Wen; Hou, Feng; Morissette, Rene |
| Abstract: | Temporary foreign workers (TFWs) are an important source of labour supply in Canada. Their transition to permanent residence may have important economic consequences, particularly in their employment and earnings trajectories. The effect of the status change may vary across different streams of TFWs who enter Canada under different terms and conditions. Hence, whether the labour market outcomes of TFWs change substantially or not after they acquire permanent residence is an empirical question. Using a unique administrative dataset, this study investigates the employment and earnings trajectories of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) during the years surrounding their acquisition of permanent residence in Canada. |
| Keywords: | Citizenship, Ethnic diversity and immigration, Immigrants and non-permanent residents, Labour market and income |
| Date: | 2017–09–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:stc:stcp3e:2017396e&r=mig |
| By: | Dieter von Fintel (Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University and Institute for Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn); Eldridge Moses (Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University) |
| Abstract: | Internal migration in South Africa has a strong gender dimension. Historically, the apartheid-era migrant labour system meant that predominantly black African men moved to urban areas without their families. After the abolition of influx controls in 1986, many women relocated, presumably to join their male partners. The period of migration feminization was also coupled with labour market feminization. However, existing research shows that increased female labour supply was poorly matched by labour market absorption, leading to rising unemployment among black African women. This paper studies incentives for female migration in this context, by building a gravity model of male and female inter-municipal migration. We find that neither men nor women move primarily for family reasons. Instead, they follow the traditional male migrant route to well-lit economic centres. Women also do not migrate primarily for increases in their own labour market opportunities, but tend to flock to regions where other fortunate groups have higher earnings potential. While this might signal that migrants base relocation decisions on incorrect information (and could in turn explain why many migrants have unfulfilled expectations), our results also show that women not only move for work, but for public services. The implications are twofold if migration is to alleviate poverty in the long run: firstly, in the short run, management of public resources must improve, as poor (women) place large emphasis on their effect; and secondly, labour market barriers – especially into the informal sector – should be better understood. |
| Keywords: | Regional migration, gravity model, feminization of migration, income mobility, economics of gender, South Africa |
| JEL: | C31 J16 J61 O15 O18 R23 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers285&r=mig |
| By: | Tommaso Frattini (University of Milan, LdA, CReAM and IZA); Elena Meschi (Department of Economics, University Of Venice Cà Foscari) |
| Abstract: | This paper provides new evidence on how the presence of immigrant peers in the classroom affects native student achievement. The analysis is based on longitudinal administrative data on two cohorts of vocational training students in Italy’s largest region. Vocational training institutions provide the ideal setting for studying these effects because they attract not only disproportionately high shares of immigrants but also the lowest ability native students. We adopt a value added model, and exploit within-school variation both within and across cohorts for identification. Our results show small negative average effects on maths test scores that are larger for low ability native students, strongly non-linear and only observable in classes with a high (top 20%) immigrant concentration. These outcomes are driven by classes with a high average linguistic distance between immigrants and natives, with no apparent role played by ethnic diversity. |
| Keywords: | Immigration, education, peer effects, vocational training, language |
| JEL: | I20 J15 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ven:wpaper:2017:20&r=mig |
| By: | Christopher F. Goetz |
| Abstract: | This paper introduces a novel data set combining survey data from the American Community Survey (ACS) with administrative data on employment from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, in order to study geographic labor mobility. With its rich set of information about individuals at the time of the migration decision, large sample size, and near-comprehensive ability to detect labor mobility, the new combined ACS-LEHD data offers several advantages over the existing data sets that are typically used in the study of migration, such as the Decennial Census, Current Population Survey, and Internal Revenue Service data. An overview of how these different data sets can be employed, and examples demonstrating the usefulness of the newly proposed data set, are provided. Aggregate statistics and stylized facts are generated from the ACS-LEHD data which reveal many of the same features as the existing data sets, including the decline of aggregate mobility throughout the past decade, as well as many of the known demographic differences in migration propensity. |
| Date: | 2017–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:17-55&r=mig |
| By: | Martinez-Zarzoso, Inmaculada |
| Abstract: | This paper uses international migration data and climate variables in a multi-country setting to investigate the extent to which international migration can be explained by changes in the local climate and whether this relationship varies between groups of countries. Moreover, the primary focus is to further investigate the differential effect found by Cattaneo and Peri (2016) for countries with different income levels using a high-frequency dataset. The idea being that country grouping is considered to be data driven, instead of exogenously decided. The estimation technique used to endogenously group the countries of origin is based on the group-mean fixedeffects (GFE) estimator proposed by Bonhomme and Manresa (2015), which allows us to group the origin countries according to the data generation process. The main results indicate that an increasing average local temperature is associated with an increase in that country's emigration rate, on average, but the effect differs between groups. The results are driven by a group of countries mainly located in Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia; however, no statistically significant association is found between the average amount of local precipitation and that country's rate of emigration. |
| Keywords: | international migration,climate change,developing countries,GFE,group heterogeneity |
| JEL: | F22 Q54 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cegedp:321&r=mig |
| By: | Rosa Sanchis-Guarner |
| Abstract: | An inflow of immigrants into a region impacts house prices in three ways. For a fixed level of local population, housing demand rises due to the increase in foreign-born population. In addition, immigrants can influence native location decisions and induce additional shifts in demand. Finally, changes in housing supply conditions can in turn affect prices. Existing reduced form estimates of the effect of immigration on house prices capture the sum of all these effects. In this paper, I propose a methodology to identify the different channels driving the total effect. I show that, conditional on supply, total changes in housing demand can be decomposed into the sum of direct immigrant demand and indirect demand changes from relocated population. The size and sign of the indirect demand effect depends on the impact of immigration on native mobility. I use Spanish data during the period 2001-2012 to estimate the different elements of the decomposition, applying an instrumental variables strategy to obtain consistent coefficients. The results show that overlooking the impact of immigration on native location induces a sizeable difference between the total and the immigrant demand effects, affecting the interpretation of the estimates. |
| Keywords: | immigration, housing, Spain, instrumental variables |
| JEL: | J61 R12 R21 |
| Date: | 2017–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:sercdp:0223&r=mig |
| By: | Shaowei Pu (Carleton University) |
| Abstract: | Previous studies have suggested that the wage gap between immigrants and the native-born can be accounted for by human capital factors, including education and work experience and, more importantly, where they are acquired. However, current Canadian economic immigration policies do not consider either a potential immigrant's location of birth or location of study. In this paper, we attempt to study the effects of the interaction between a worker's location of birth and location of study on his or her wage with data from the 2011 National Household Survey. Using both OLS and median regression LAD, performed in STATA, we show that (1) the location of birth is not generally indicative of a workers earning potential; (2) without the interactions, all foreign degrees lead to a lower wage compared with Canadian peers, with a U.S. degree being the least punitive; (3) a U.S. degree would lead to a wage premium for workers from some countries; and (4) when a worker from a nontraditional foreign student source country receives a degree in a culturally and geographically distant location, there is a significant wage premium. |
| Date: | 2017–09–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boc:csug17:11&r=mig |