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on Economics of Human Migration |
| By: | Scott Fulford (Boston College); Ivan Petkov (Boston College); Fabio Schiantarelli (Boston College; IZA) |
| Abstract: | The United States provides a unique laboratory for understanding how the cultural, institutional, and human capital endowments of immigrant groups shape economic outcomes. In this paper, we use census micro-sample information to reconstruct the country-of-ancestry distribution for US counties from 1850 to 2010. We also develop a county-level measure of GDP per capita over the same period. Using this novel panel data set, we investigate whether changes in the ancestry composition of a county matter for local economic development and the channels through which the cultural, institutional, and educational legacy of the country of origin affects economic outcomes in the US. Our results show that the evolution of the country-of-origin composition of a county matters. Moreover, the culture, institutions, and human capital that the immigrant groups brought with them and pass on to their children are positively associated with local development in the US. Among these factors, measures of culture that capture attitudes towards cooperation play the most important and robust role. Finally, our results suggest that while fractionalization of ancestry groups is positively related with county GDP, fractionalization in attributes such as trust is negatively related to local economic performance. |
| Keywords: | Immigration, Ethnicity, Ancestry, Economic Development, Culture, Institutions |
| JEL: | J15 N31 N32 O10 Z10 |
| Date: | 2015–05–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:boc:bocoec:875&r=mig |
| By: | Timothy Halliday (University of Hawaii at Manoa); Wayne Liou (University of Hawaii at Manoa) |
| Abstract: | In 2007, the State of Arizona passed the Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) which required all employers to verify the legal status of all prospective employ ees. Using the American Community Survey, we show that LAWA induced a large emigration away from Arizona. We estimate that roughly 36,000 Mexican-born people left Arizona as a consequence of LAWA and that about 25% of those who left relocated to New Mexico suggesting that LAWA had spillovers on adjoining states. Finally, the effects of LAWA were the most pronounced in the farming and construction sectors. |
| Keywords: | E-Verify, Legal Arizona Workers Act, Spillover |
| JEL: | J61 J68 |
| Date: | 2015–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hai:wpaper:201508&r=mig |
| By: | Abigail Cooke; Thomas Kemeny |
| Abstract: | Using comprehensive longitudinal matched employer-employee data for the U.S.,this paper provides new evidence on the relationship between productivity and immigration-spawned urban diversity. Existing empirical work has uncovered a robust positive correlation between productivity and immigrant diversity, supporting theory suggesting that diversity acts as a local public good that makes workers more productive by enlarging the pool of knowledge available to them, as well as by fostering opportunities for them to recombine ideas to generate novelty. This paper makes several empirical and conceptual contributions. First, it improves on existing empirical work by addressing various sources of potential bias, especially from unobserved heterogeneity among individuals, work establishments, and cities. Second, it augments identification by using longitudinal data that permits examination of how diversity and productivity co-move. Third, the paper seeks to reveal whether diversity acts upon productivity chiefly at the scale of the city or the workplace. Findings confirm that urban immigrant diversity produces positive and nontrivial spillovers for U.S. workers. This social return represents a distinct channel through which immigration generates broad-based economic benefits. |
| Keywords: | Immigrants, diversity, productivity, spillovers, cities |
| JEL: | O4 R0 O18 F22 J61 |
| Date: | 2015–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:sercdp:sercd0175&r=mig |
| By: | Jun Gu; Annika Mueller; Ingrid Nielsen; Jason Shachat; Russell Smyth |
| Abstract: | The last decade has seen a massive influx of Chinese migrants to sub-Saharan Africa, where many have opened small businesses to compete amongst local merchants. These Chinese have often met resistance from the local competition, resulting in a sharp social divide. The current paper draw’s on Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis theory and reports on the results of two experimental studies that examined the effects of direct and imagined contact on indigenous Malawian shopkeepers’ willingness to spend future time with their Chinese counterparts. Results show that direct contact led to Malawians’ greater willingness to spend time with their Chinese counterparts, and this effect persisted over a time period of ten days, when a follow up survey was conducted. In contrast, imagined contact did not change Malawians’ willingness to spend future time with Chinese. Implications of these results for China’s ambitions to introduce its development model into Africa are discussed. |
| Keywords: | Chinese migrants in Africa, social contact, Chinese small business |
| Date: | 2015–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mos:moswps:2015-04&r=mig |
| By: | Dominique Meurs (EconomiX, Université Paris-Ouest); Patrick Puhani (Leibniz Universität Hannover); Friederiki Von Haaren (Niedersächsisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (NIW)) |
| Abstract: | We document the educational integration of immigrant children with a focus on the link between family size and educational decisions and distinguishing particularly between firstand second-generation immigrants and between source country groups. First, for immigrant adolescents, we show family-size adjusted convergence to almost native levels of higher education track attendance from the first to the second generation of immigrants. Second, we find that reduced fertility is associated with higher educational outcomes for immigrant children, possibly through a quantity-quality trade-off. Third, we show that between one third and the complete difference in family-size adjusted educational outcomes between immigrants from different source countries or immigrant generations can be explained by parental background. This latter holds true for various immigrant groups in both France and Germany, two major European economies with distinct immigration histories. |
| Keywords: | migration, integration, quantity-quality trade-off, decomposition |
| JEL: | J13 J15 J24 |
| Date: | 2015–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:1508&r=mig |
| By: | Meurs, Dominique; Puhani, Patrick A.; Von Haaren, Friederike |
| Abstract: | We document the educational integration of immigrant children with a focus on the link between family size and educational decisions and distinguishing particularly between firstand second-generation immigrants and between source country groups. First, for immigrant adolescents, we show family-size adjusted convergence to almost native levels of higher education track attendance from the first to the second generation of immigrants. Second, we find that reduced fertility is associated with higher educational outcomes for immigrant children, possibly through a quantity-quality trade-off. Third, we show that between one third and the complete difference in family-size adjusted educational outcomes between immigrants from different source countries or immigrant generations can be explained by parental background. This latter holds true for various immigrant groups in both France and Germany, two major European economies with distinct immigration histories. |
| JEL: | J13 J15 J24 |
| Date: | 2015–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usg:econwp:2015:15&r=mig |
| By: | Oriana Bandiera; Myra Mohnen; Imran Rasul; Martina Viarengo |
| Abstract: | By the mid-19th century, America was the best educated nation on Earth: signi…cant …nancial investments in education were being undertaken and the majority of children voluntarily attended public schools. So why did US states start introducing compulsory schooling laws at this point in time? We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence that compulsory schooling laws were used as a nation-building tool to homogenize the civic values held by the tens of millions of culturally diverse migrants who moved to America during the 'Age of Mass Migration'. Our central finding is that the adoption of compulsory schooling by American-born median voters occurs significantly earlier in time in states that host many migrants who had lower exposure to civic values in their home countries and had lower demand for common schooling when in the US. By providing micro-foundations for such laws, our study highlights an important link between mass migration and institutional change, where changes are driven by the policy choices of native median-voters in the receiving country rather than migrant settlers themselves |
| JEL: | D02 F22 I28 O15 P16 |
| Date: | 2015–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:stieop:57&r=mig |
| By: | Tushar Agrawal (Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research); S .Chandrasekhar (Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research) |
| Abstract: | With 53 percent of India's labour force still engaged in agriculture it is apparent that India has not witnessed a reduction in the share of population working in agriculture. This is primarily because in the two decades of economic reforms, beginning the nineties, adequate new jobs were not created in other sectors of the economy. With rural unemployment rates being sticky, the phenomenon of short term migration has become important in rural India. This paper uses a nationally representative data on migration to examine the characteristics of short term migrants. Since the spatial distribution of jobs is an important determinant of the decision of migrate we compute the location quotient to identify whether a district has a higher concentration of workers in agriculture, manufacturing, construction and services sector. After controlling for household and individual characteristics, we find that an ndividual is more likely to be a short term migrant if the individual is from a district with a higher concentration of workers in the construction industry. Using instrumental variable model, we find that short term migrants earn low wages compared to non-short term migrant. Following this we model the transition of short term migrant workers across industries drawing on the literature on transition measures developed to measure income and occupational mobility. |
| Keywords: | Short Term Migration, Wages |
| JEL: | O1 R23 |
| Date: | 2015–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ind:igiwpp:2015-007&r=mig |
| By: | Natalia Victorovna Kuznetsova, Natalia Alexandrovna Vorobeva (School of Economics and Management, Far Eastern Federal University, Russia) |
| Abstract: | The paper examines the problem of global integration processes in regions of Africa, Asia and Russia. Based on migration flows, estimation of integration indexes, we investigate the historical integration development of these regions and identify the important features for future international cooperation and integration. This article presents the preliminary results of the gravity model that we constructed using the features of Asia-Pacific region. We concluded that differences and similarities in sectoral structure of GDP do not influence increasing of mutual trade between countries and its partners. It evaluates the potential benefits for Asia-Pacific region by expanding the market for export industries worldwide. |
| Keywords: | global integration process, gravity model, ASEAN, Asia-Pacific Region, economy of North-East Asia, integration process of South Africa |
| JEL: | R11 |
| Date: | 2015–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:esb:petprv:2015-105&r=mig |
| By: | Sebastian Galiani; Gustavo Torrens |
| Abstract: | We explore the political economy of trade and labor mobility in a Ricardian world. We combine a Ricardian economy with a simple international political economy model as a basis for the determination of trade and labor mobility policies. We show that free trade can induce partial convergence, divergence or even a reversal of fortune in terms of the well-being of workers in every country, while free trade and free labor mobility lead to full convergence. We also show that free trade and no labor mobility is a Nash equilibrium of the political game, but free trade and free labor mobility is not. Thus, in a Ricardian world, the lack of convergence in levels of well-being across countries can be attributed to an international political equilibrium that blocks free labor mobility. We verify our main results under several variants of a Ricardian economy, including different assumptions about the set of goods, preferences and the number of countries involved. We also study two extensions of our model in which free trade and at least partial labor mobility is a Nash equilibrium of the political game. One extension introduces increasing returns to scale while the other an extractive elite. |
| JEL: | F13 F22 |
| Date: | 2015–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21274&r=mig |
| By: | Hippolyte D'Albis (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS, EEP-PSE - Ecole d'Économie de Paris - Paris School of Economics); Ekrame Boubtane (CERDI - Centre d'études et de recherches sur le developpement international - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I - CNRS, CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS); Dramane Coulibaly (EconomiX - CNRS - UP10 - Université Paris 10, Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense) |
| Abstract: | This paper quantitatively assesses the interaction between permanent immigration into France and France's macroeconomic performance as seen through its GDP per capita and its unemployment rate. It takes advantage of a new database where immigration is measured by the flow of newly-issued long-term residence permits, categorized by both the nationality of the immigrant and the reason of permit issuance. Using a VAR model estimation of monthly data over the period 1994-2008, we find that immigration flow significantly responds to France's macroeconomic performance: positively to the country's GDP per capita and negatively to its unemployment rate. At the same time, we find that immigration itself increases France's GDP per capita, particularly in the case of family immigration. This family immigration also reduces the country's unemployment rate, especially when the families come from developing countries. |
| Date: | 2015–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-01162441&r=mig |
| By: | Robert Mooney (Geary Institute for Public Policy, University College Dublin) |
| Abstract: | Recent media reports and public policy debates have highlighted concerns regarding the impact on children of growing up in Direct Provision Centres (DP) in the asylum system in Ireland. This system has been criticised for the poor quality of the accommodation in which asylum seekers reside and the inadequate provision of resources, services and supports to meet their basic needs. Children’s development is significantly influenced by their environment. The risks and opportunities experienced at this stage of life can radically influence their social skills, mental wellbeing, and their physical health (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Evidence suggests that the children of immigrant populations face additional challenges of integration into their host societies (Ager and Strang, 2004). This review of national and international research suggests that these issues are compounded in the case of children growing up in asylum systems. As some children spend between four 4 and eight 8 years living in these institutions, it is critical to assess the developmental consequences of growing up in DP. This paper examines the national and international legislation governing asylum systems, provides an overview of the Irish Direct Provision system and suggests a model under which these cases may be analysed across different societal levels. |
| Date: | 2015–06–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ucd:wpaper:201511&r=mig |