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on Economics of Human Migration |
| By: | Jérôme Gonnot; Federica lo Polito |
| Abstract: | This paper uses data on individual political opinions from the European Social Survey to study the role of horizontal cultural transmission on immigrants' political assimilation in Western Europe. We analyze five key political issues: redistribution, gay rights, EU integration, immigration policy and trust in political institutions. Controlling for individual socio-economic characteristics, we document that immigrants show identical support for redistribution as natives, display more conservative attitudes towards gay rights and more liberal views on the other three issues. These differences widen with the cultural and religious distance between immigrants' background and Western European norms, and decrease with the number of years since migration. Among immigrants that have spent at least 10 years in their host country, attitudes towards migration policy catch up with those of natives and the migrant-to-native gap on political trust is reduced by 80\%. In contrast, differences on EU integration and gay rights remain stable while immigrants' views on redistribution becomes relatively more conservative. These attitude-specific patterns are also salient when studying political preferences at the regional and sub-regional level. Our results strongly point towards the transmission of cultural values from natives to immigrants on matters of immigration policy and political trust, whereas attitudes towards redistribution seem immune to cultural influences at destination. |
| Keywords: | Immigration;Assimilation;Political Attitudes;Cultural Transmission |
| JEL: | D72 J15 P16 R23 Z1 |
| Date: | 2023–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cii:cepidt:2023-12&r=mig |
| By: | Amrita Kulka; Till Nikolka; Panu Poutvaara; Silke Uebelmesser |
| Abstract: | We analyze perceptions of international applicability of one’s education and migration aspirations and intentions among university students in Czechia, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Spain. Students in law perceive their education least internationally applicable. Perceived international applicability strongly predicts migration aspirations and intentions also after controlling for study fields, individual characteristics, and university fixed effects. Furthermore, among those not studying law, hours spent studying are increasing with perceived international applicability of one’s education. Our findings are consistent with predictions from a model in which students invest in their education before learning their mobility status. . |
| Keywords: | education, migration, migration aspirations |
| JEL: | F22 I21 J24 |
| Date: | 2023 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10395&r=mig |
| By: | Rinaldi, Riccardo; Arrighetti, Alessandro; Lasagni, Andrea; Canello, Jacopo |
| Abstract: | The aim of this paper is to use a multi-country approach to assess the role played by individual characteristics and local labor market conditions in influencing migrants’ self-employment decisions. The empirical investigation exploits data from the EU Labor Force Survey for the 2005-2016 period and focuses on two countries (Italy and the UK) characterized by significantly different labor market dynamics. Our findings suggest that the impact of individual characteristics is similar across countries, whereas the role of the local economic environment changes significantly, resulting in different migrant entrepreneurship patterns. These findings appear to be consistent with the most recent strand of literature, suggesting that while individual characteristics of self-employed migrants are similar across countries, national and regional differences play a key role in determining migrants’ entrepreneurial propensity. |
| Keywords: | migrant, entrepreneurship, regional economics |
| Date: | 2023 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esprep:270873&r=mig |
| By: | Achim Ahrens; Alessandra Stampi-Bombelli; Selina Kurer; Dominik Hangartner |
| Abstract: | The challenge of assigning optimal treatment policies is ubiquitous in public economics. While a vast empirical literature is concerned with the estimation of causal effects under treatment effect heterogeneity, the potentials of individualized treatment assignments are under-explored, despite recent advances in the field of policy learning. We evaluate the benefits of multi-action policy learning using policy trees in the context of immigration naturalization. We use a tailored two-phase randomized field experiment to estimate and field a policy rule for an information campaign encouraging eligible immigrants in the City of Z\"urich to apply for Swiss citizenship. The policy rule takes the form of a decision tree assigning treatments based on individual-level characteristics drawn from linked administrative data. In the exploration phase, we randomly allocate 60% of our sample of 5, 145 citizenship-eligible immigrants to receive one of three different letters addressing specific naturalization hurdles pertaining to the lack of information and encouragement. The exploitation phase estimates and fields the policy rule on one-half of the remaining sample while sending random treatment letters to the other half. While we find only moderate levels of heterogeneity, the policy tree yields a larger, albeit not significant, increase in take-up compared to the best-performing one-size-fits-all treatment. |
| Date: | 2023–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2305.00545&r=mig |
| By: | Paolo Emilio Mistrulli (Bank of Italy); Md Taslim Uddin (Independent University Bangladesh); Alberto Zazzaro (University of Naples Federico II, CSEF and MoFiR) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we explore empirically whether immigrants, other things being equal, pay more for mortgages than natives and whether the probability that banks approve their loan applications is systematically lower. To this aim, we use two extensive and unique dataset of mortgage contracts and banks' requests for initial information about potential mortgagors drawn from the Italian Credit Register for the period 2011-2016, and survey data from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth conducted by the Bank of Italy for the period 2006-2016. We find that immigrants pay 20-24 basis points more than native Italians on single-name mortgages and 28-40 basis points more on jointly-owned ones. This interest rate gap narrows significantly, but does not disappear, when immigrant borrowers' credit history lengthens or if they borrow from a cooperative bank. Finally we find that immigrants have a 2.7% smaller chance of getting a mortgage compared to natives, which decreases for mortgage applications submitted to cooperative banks. Overall, our findings suggest that the disparity of treatment of immigrants in the Italian mortgage market is mostly due to a greater difficulty of banks in assessing the credit-worthiness of culturally distant borrowers. However, we also detect that cultural distance may fuel persistent disparity between migrants and natives. |
| Keywords: | Immigrants; discrimination; mortgage lending; interest rates; loan approval |
| JEL: | G21 J15 J71 |
| Date: | 2023–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:anc:wmofir:180&r=mig |
| By: | Maximiliano Dvorkin |
| Abstract: | I develop a dynamic model of migration and labor market choice with incomplete markets and uninsurable income risk to quantify the effects of international trade on workers’ employment reallocation, earnings, and wealth. Macroeconomic conditions in different labor markets and idiosyncratic shocks shape agents’ labor market choices, consumption, earnings, and asset accumulation over time. Despite the rich heterogeneity, the model is highly tractable as the optimal consumption, labor supply, capital accumulation, and migration and reallocation decisions of individual workers across different markets have closed-form expressions and can be aggregated. I study the asymmetric impact of international trade on the evolution of employment, earnings, and wealth, and decompose the frictions workers face to reallocate across U.S. sectors and regions into those with a transitory effect and those with long-lasting consequences. |
| Keywords: | international trade; migration; spatial equilibrium; dynamic Roy models; human capital; wealth; inequality |
| JEL: | E21 E24 F16 F66 J24 J61 R23 |
| Date: | 2023–03–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedlwp:95863&r=mig |