nep-mig New Economics Papers
on Economics of Human Migration
Issue of 2018‒03‒05
ten papers chosen by
Yuji Tamura
La Trobe University

  1. Is high-skilled migration harmful to tax systems' progressivity? By Laurent Simula; Alain Trannoy
  2. Shaking Up the Equilibrium: Natural Disasters, Economic Activity, and Immigration By Ager, Philipp; Hansen, Casper Worm; Lønstrup, Lars
  3. Gender differentiation in intergenerational care-giving and migration choices By Stark, Oded; Curkowska-Torzewska, Ewa
  4. Making Big Changes: The Impact of Moves on Marriage among U.S. Army Personnel By Susan Payne Carter; Abigail Wozniak
  5. Immigrant background and expected early school leaving in Europe: evidence from PISA By Ralph Hippe; Maciej Jakubowski
  6. Israel’s Immigration Story: Winners and Losers By Assaf Razin
  7. The causality between economic growth and immigration in EU/EFTA member states By Manuel González Gómez; Mª Soledad Otero Giráldez
  8. Age at Arrival and Assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration By Rohan Alexander; Zachary Ward
  9. Public Opinion and Immigration: Who Favors Employment Discrimination against Immigrants? By Cooray, Arusha; Marfouk, Abdeslam; Nazir, Maliha
  10. I’m Neither Racist nor Xenophobic, but: Dissecting European Attitudes towards a Ban on Muslims’ Immigration By Marfouk, Abdeslam

  1. By: Laurent Simula (GATE Lyon Saint-Étienne - Groupe d'analyse et de théorie économique - ENS Lyon - École normale supérieure - Lyon - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - UCBL - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Université de Lyon - UJM - Université Jean Monnet [Saint-Étienne] - Université de Lyon - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Alain Trannoy (GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille - ECM - Ecole Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales)
    Keywords: tax competition,top income earners,migration
    Date: 2018
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01644427&r=mig
  2. By: Ager, Philipp (Department of Business and Economics); Hansen, Casper Worm (University of Copenhagen); Lønstrup, Lars (Department of Business and Economics)
    Abstract: This paper examines the long-run effects on the spatial distribution of economic activity caused by historical shocks. Using variation in the potential damage intensity of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake across cities in the American West, we show that more severely affected cities experienced lower population growth relative to less affected cities after the earthquake. This negative effect persisted until the late 20th century. The earthquake diverted migrants to less affected areas in the region, which, together with reinforcing dynamic agglomeration effects from scale economies, left a long-lasting mark on the location of economic activity in the American West.
    Keywords: Economic geography; Location of economic activity; Migration; Natural disasters
    JEL: O15 O40 R11 R12
    Date: 2018–02–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:sdueko:2018_002&r=mig
  3. By: Stark, Oded; Curkowska-Torzewska, Ewa
    Abstract: We weave together care-giving, gender, and migration. We hypothesize that daughters who are mothers have a stronger incentive than sons who are fathers to demonstrate to their children the appropriate way of caring for one's parents. The reason underlying this hypothesis is that women on average live longer than men, they tend to marry men who are older than they are and, thus, they are more likely than men to spend their last years without a spouse. Because it is more effective and less costly to care for parents if they live nearby, daughters with children do not move as far away from the parental home as sons with children or childless offspring. Data on the distance between the children's location and the parents' location extracted from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), in conjunction with data on selected demographic characteristics and institutional indicators taken from Eurostat, the OECD, and the World Bank, lend support to our hypothesis: compared to childless daughters, childless sons, and sons who are fathers, daughters who are mothers choose to live closer to their parents' home.
    Keywords: Demonstration of care-giving across generations,Gender differentiation,Migration distance from the parental home
    JEL: D10 D64 J13 J14 J16
    Date: 2018
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:tuewef:104&r=mig
  4. By: Susan Payne Carter; Abigail Wozniak
    Abstract: We use exogenously determined, long-distance relocations of U.S. Army soldiers to investigate the impact of moving on marriage. We find that marriage rates increase sharply around the time of a move in an event study analysis. Reduced form exposure analysis reveals that an additional move over a five year period increases the likelihood of marriage by 14 percent. Moves increase childbearing by a similar magnitude, suggesting that marriages induced by a move are formed with long-term intentions. These findings are consistent with a model where the marriage decision is costly and relocation lowers the costs to making this decision. Our results have implications for understanding how people make major life decisions such as marriage, as well as the cost of migration.
    JEL: J1 J12 J13 J61
    Date: 2018–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24300&r=mig
  5. By: Ralph Hippe (European Commission - JRC); Maciej Jakubowski (University of Warsaw and Evidence Institute)
    Abstract: This technical brief analyses the relationship between immigrant status and educational expectations in PISA. Immigrants have become a very policy-relevant issue during the last recent years, in particular with the occurrence of the refugee crisis. Moreover, the freedom of movement in the EU has led to relevant migration flows across EU Member States. At the same time, the EU has set itself the Europe 2020 headline target of reducing the share of early school leavers to 10 % within the EU. Early school leavers are generally disadvantaged socially and economically in later stages in life, so that it is important to better understand their motivations and provide adequate policy solutions. The European Commission (2016, p. 3) indicates that early school leavers are more likely to come from immigrant student groups, as their “early school leaving rates are nearly twice as high as for the native population†. Yet it also emphasises that there is still a lack of evidence pointing to the underlying reasons. In consequence, this study considers jointly these two groups, immigrant students and early school leavers. More specifically, we analyse the factors that are most strongly related to disparities in the probability to leave school early, putting special attention to immigrant status (by differentiating among first and second generation immigrants and, where possible, among EU and non-EU immigrants). To this end, we use OECD’s PISA data, which are the most widely employed data on international student assessment. However, early school leavers cannot directly be considered with these data, but it is possible to analyse educational expectations, including the expectation to dropout early from school. As the related literature emphasises, these expectations are very closely linked to actually realised educational career patterns. Therefore, we can use these expectations to gain insights on the factors influencing early school leaving. In addition, we also employ data from Eurostat to complement the picture on early school leavers and immigrants. We analyse the issues at stake in various ways. First, we provide a range of descriptive data on immigrants and expected early school leavers. Second, we run a number of two-level logit regression models, including a range of student- and school-level variables. In particular, we consider all (available) EU Member States together, before providing results for each MS individually. Finally, we also distinguish more specifically between EU and non-EU immigrants in our regression models. The results show that immigrant students do mostly not structurally differ in their expected early dropout probability to natives across Europe. In other words, the reasons why students expect to leave school early are the same for both immigrant students and natives. This finding implies that it is more important to focus on the specific factors that lead to expected early school leaving common to all students, than to concentrate only on specific immigrant-related factors to decrease the occurrence of expected early school leaving among immigrant students. In particular, our results suggest that the factors most strongly increasing the probability of early school leaving at the student level are the socio-economic background of students, epistemological beliefs and grade repetition, while we find that the most consistent factor is to be found at the school level, being the school’s expected early school leavers probability. The school-environment thus appears to play a key role in shaping educational expectations. Among the student-related factors, grade repetition is the most amenable by policy, so that grade repetition practices may be reconsidered by national policy makers.
    Keywords: Regions, Europe, PISA, education, skills, multilevel analysis
    Date: 2018–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:iptwpa:jrc109065&r=mig
  6. By: Assaf Razin
    Abstract: The exodus of Soviet Jews to Israel in the 1990s was a unique event. The immigration wave was distinctive for its large high skilled cohort, and its quick integration into the domestic labor market. Immigration also changed the entire economic landscape: it raised productivity, underpinned by the information technological surge, and had significant impact on income inequality. The extraordinary experience of Israel, which has received three quarter million migrants from the Former Soviet Union within a short time, is also relevant for the current debate about winners and losers from immigration. This paper provides a rigorous explanation for a possible link between the immigration wave and the changed level of redistribution in Israel’s welfare state.
    JEL: F2 H0
    Date: 2018–02
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24283&r=mig
  7. By: Manuel González Gómez; Mª Soledad Otero Giráldez
    Abstract: The EU/EFTA Member States attract yearly a large population of immigrants. Economists, demographers, historians and sociologists generally agree that the need to fill labor market gaps and the income differences between host and sending countries explain migration into industrialized nations. They also recognize that demographic changes that occur through immigration have important economic effects. However, regarding the existence of economic repercussions of migration, there is no conclusive evidence on the relationship between economic growth and immigration. To this end, the Granger Long-run causality based on the Error Correction Model (ECM) and Johansen cointegration technique and Granger Causality Test were applied to Eurostat database for EU/EFTA nations.
    Keywords: Cointegration; foreign population; economic growth, Granger causality test
    JEL: J61 O15
    Date: 2017–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vig:wpaper:1701&r=mig
  8. By: Rohan Alexander; Zachary Ward
    Abstract: We estimate the effect of age at arrival for immigrant outcomes with a new dataset of arrivals linked to the 1940 United States Census. Using within-family variation, we find that arriving at an older age, or having more childhood exposure to the European environment, led to a more negative wage gap relative to the native born. Infant arrivals had a positive wage gap relative to natives, in contrast to a negative gap for teenage arrivals. Therefore, a key determinant of immigrant outcomes during the Age of Mass Migration was the country of residence during critical periods of childhood development.
    Keywords: Age at arrival, Assimilation, Childhood environment.
    JEL: N31 F22 J61
    Date: 2018–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:auu:hpaper:064&r=mig
  9. By: Cooray, Arusha; Marfouk, Abdeslam; Nazir, Maliha
    Abstract: Using information from the world values survey wave 6 containing information from 78,743 respondents in 53 countries, we examine the factors which influence respondents’ answers to the question: “when jobs are scarce, should employers give priority to people of the country of origin rather than immigrants?” Taking into account a number of factors including, economic, socio-demographic, political and individual level characteristics we find that all of these factors influence respondents’ preference for this form of discrimination.
    Keywords: International migration,discrimination,public opinion
    JEL: F22 J71 J79
    Date: 2018
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:175&r=mig
  10. By: Marfouk, Abdeslam
    Abstract: During his presidential campaign, the new elected President of U.S., Donald Trump, called for a complete ban on Muslims from entering the United States. Although numerous European observers have been shocked by his racist proposal, using the most recent round of the European Social Survey, this paper found that a sizeable proportion of Europeans support a similar ban in their own countries, e.g. Czech Republic (54%), Hungary (51%), Estonia (42%), Poland (33%), and Portugal (33%). The paper also provides evidence that racism and immigration phobia play a key role in shaping Europeans’ support of a ban on Muslim immigration. This finding challenges the discourse and campaigns of the populist groups who exploit the ‘Islamization of Europe’ rhetoric successfully and use various pretexts to justify a call for a ban on Muslims’ immigration, e.g. the threat to security, secularism, democracy, Western ‘identity’, culture and values.
    Keywords: Internatonal migration,discrimination,islamophobia,racism,public opinion
    JEL: F22 J71 J79
    Date: 2018
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:174&r=mig

This nep-mig issue is ©2018 by Yuji Tamura. It is provided as is without any express or implied warranty. It may be freely redistributed in whole or in part for any purpose. If distributed in part, please include this notice.
General information on the NEP project can be found at http://nep.repec.org. For comments please write to the director of NEP, Marco Novarese at <director@nep.repec.org>. Put “NEP” in the subject, otherwise your mail may be rejected.
NEP’s infrastructure is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Massey University in New Zealand.