Research

Abstract. This paper investigates the impact of television on internal migration in Indonesia. We exploit the differential introduction of private television throughout the country and the variation in signal reception due to topography to estimate the causal effect of media exposure. Our estimates reveal important long and short run effects. An increase of one standard deviation in the number of private TV channels received in the area of residence as an adolescent reduces future inter-provincial migration by 1.7–2.7 percentage points, and all migration (inter and intra-provincial) by 3.9–6.8 percentage points. Short run effects are similar in magnitude. We also show that respondents less exposed to private television are more likely to consider themselves among the poorest groups in society. As we discuss in a stylized model of migration choice under imperfect information, these findings are consistent with Indonesian citizens over-estimating the net gains from internal migration when access to television is limited.

Abstract. This paper focuses on empirical connections between crime and immigration, studying two large waves of recent U.K. immigration (the late 1990s/early 2000s asylum seekers and the post-2004 inflow from EU accession countries). The first wave led to a modest but significant rise in property crime, while the second wave had a small negative impact. There was no effect on violent crime; arrest rates were not different, and changes in crime cannot be ascribed to crimes against immigrants. The findings are consistent with the notion that differences in labor market opportunities of different migrant groups shape their potential impact on crime. 

Abstract. This study analyses the effect of local crime rates on residents' mental health. Using longitudinal information on individuals' mental well‐being, we address the problem of sorting and endogenous moving behaviour. We find that crime causes considerable mental distress for residents, primarily driven by property crime. Effects are stronger for females, and mainly related to depression and anxiety. The distress caused by one SD increase in local crime is 2–4 times larger than that caused by a 1 SD decrease in local employment, and about one‐seventh of the short‐term impact of the 7 July 2005 London Bombings.

Abstract. We analyze the effect of immigrants’ legal status on their consumption behavior using unique survey data that samples both documented and undocumented immigrants. To address the problem of sorting into legal status, we propose two alternative identification strategies as exogenous source of variation for current legal status: First, transitory income shocks in the home country, measured as rainfall shocks at the time of emigration. Second, amnesty quotas that grant legal residence status to undocumented immigrants. Both sources of variation create a strong first stage, and—although very different in nature—lead to similar estimates of the effects of illegal status on consumption, with undocumented immigrants consuming about 40% less than documented immigrants, conditional on background characteristics. Roughly one quarter of this decrease is explained by undocumented immigrants having lower incomes than documented immigrants. Our findings imply that legalization programs may have a potentially important effect on immigrants’ consumption behavior, with consequences for both the source and host countries.

Abstract. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of refugee migration, with emphasis on the current refugee crisis. After first reviewing the institutional framework laid out by the Geneva Convention for Refugees, we demonstrate that, despite numerous attempts at developing a common European asylum policy, EU countries continue to differ widely in interpretation and implementation. We then describe key features of the current refugee crisis and document the overall magnitudes and types of refugee movements, illegal border crossings and asylum applications to EU Member States. We next study the labour market integration of past refugee migrants to EU countries and draw conclusions for the current situation. Finally, we turn to the economics of refugee migrations, contrasting economic and refugee migrants, discussing the trade-offs between long-term asylum and temporary protection and highlighting the benefits of well-coordinated national asylum policies. We conclude with several policy recommendations.

Abstract. This article estimates the causal effect of the prospect of legal status on the employment outcomes of undocumented immigrants. The identification strategy exploits a natural experiment provided by an Italian amnesty program that introduced an exogenous discontinuity in eligibility based on date of arrival. The authors find that immigrants who are potentially eligible for legal status under the amnesty program have a significantly higher probability of being employed relative to undocumented immigrants who are not eligible. The size of the estimated effect is equivalent to about half the increase in employment that undocumented immigrants in our sample normally experience during their first year in Italy. These findings are robust to several checks and falsification exercises.

Abstract. Do general amnesty programs lead to reductions in the crime rate among immigrants? We answer this question by exploiting cross-sectional and time variation in the number of immigrants legalized by the enactment of repeated amnesty programs between 1990 and 2005 in Italy. We address the potential endogeneity of the ‘legalization treatment’ by instrumenting the actual number of legalized immigrants with alternative predicted measures based on past amnesty applications patterns and residential choices of documented and undocumented immigrants. We find that, in the year following an amnesty, regions in which a higher share of immigrants obtained legal status experienced a greater decline in non-EU immigrant crime rates, relative to other regions. The effect is statistically significant but relatively small and not persistent. In further results, we fail to find any evidence of substitution in the criminal market from other population groups—namely, EU immigrants and Italian citizens—and we observe a small and not persistent reduction in total offenses. 

Abstract. This article investigates the medium to long-term effects on refugee labour market outcomes of the temporary employment bans being imposed in many countries on recently arrived asylum seekers. Using a newly collected dataset covering almost 30 years of employment restrictions together with individual data for refugees entering European countries between 1985 and 2012, our empirical strategy exploits the geographical and temporal variation in employment bans generated by staggered introduction and removal coupled with frequent changes at the intensive margin. We find that exposure to a ban at arrival reduces refugee employment probability in post-ban years by 15%, an impact driven primarily by lower labour market participation. These effects are not mechanical, since we exclude refugees who may still be subject to employment restrictions, are non-linear in ban length, confirming that the very first months following arrival play a key role in shaping integration prospects, and last up to 10 years post arrival. We further demonstrate that the detrimental effects of employment bans are concentrated among less educated refugees, translate into lower occupational quality, and seem not to be driven by selective migration. Our causal estimates are robust to several identification tests accounting for the potential endogeneity of employment ban policies, including placebo analysis of non-refugee migrants and an instrumental variable strategy. To illustrate the costs of these employment restrictions, we estimate a EUR 37.6 billion output loss from the bans imposed on asylum seekers who arrived in Europe during the so-called 2015 refugee crisis.

Abstract. We study the labour market performance of refugees vis-à-vis comparable migrants across 20 European countries and over time. In the first part of our analysis, we document that labour market outcomes for refugees are consistently worse than those for other migrants. Refugees are 11.6% less likely to have a job and 22% more likely to be unemployed than other migrants with similar characteristics. Their income, occupational quality and labour market participation are also relatively weaker. These gaps are larger relative to economic than non-economic migrants, and persist until about 10–15 years after immigration. In the second part of our analysis, we investigate the role of economic conditions and migration and asylum policy regimes at the time of arrival in shaping integration paths of refugees. First, we find that immigrating in a recession produces scarring effects for all migrants but no differential effect for forced migrants, leaving little role for this channel to explain observed refugee gaps. Secondly, we focus on the impact on refugees of being subject to spatial dispersal policies. Our estimates imply that dispersed refugees experience a persistent impact on their residential choices and substantial long run losses in their economic integration with respect to non-dispersed refugees.

Abstract. This paper analyses the relationship between attitudes toward risk and household migration decisions in a rural-developing country setting. We build a model that studies migration decisions when risk preferences among family members are heterogeneous. Our model implies that (i) conditional on migration gains, less risk averse individuals are more likely to migrate; (ii) within households, the least risk averse individual is more likely to emigrate; and (iii) across households, the most risk averse households are more likely to send migrants as long as they have at least one family member that is sufficiently risk loving. Using unique data for China on risk attitudes of internal (rural-urban) migrants and their families that are left behind we find clear evidence for all these predictions. Our results not only provide strong evidence that migration decisions are taken on the level of the household, but also that risk attitudes of household members other than the migrant affect not only individual migrations but also whether a household sends a migrant at all.

Abstract.  We provide a first systematic assessment of the labor market impact of COVID-19 on immigrant workers in Europe. In 2020, we estimate that Extra EU migrants were twice as likely to experience employment loss relative to comparable natives, while this probability was 1.6 times higher for EU migrants. To understand the determinants of these large gaps, we focus on three job characteristics - essentiality, temporariness and teleworkability - and document that migrants were over-represented among essential, temporary and low-teleworkable occupations at the onset of the pandemic. We estimate that pre-pandemic occupational sorting accounts for 25-35% of the explained native-migrants gaps in the risk of employment termination, while sorting into industries accounts for the rest. More than half of the migrant-native gap in job separation probability remains unexplained even when controlling for occupational characteristics and industry fixed effects. According to our estimates, migrants face a disproportionately large penalty from being employed in low-teleworkable occupations. Although major employment losses were averted thanks to a massive use of short time work programs in Europe, migrant workers - and Extra EU migrants in particular - still suffered from high economic vulnerability during the pandemic.

Abstract. Programmes aimed at reducing the presence of unauthorized immigrants are often at the core of the migration policy debate in host countries. In recent years, a growing body of empirical literature has attempted to understand the effect of lacking legal status on immigrants’ outcomes and behaviour. The main difficulties in this field are the scarcity of data and the identification challenge posed by endogenous selection into legal status. The vast majority of these articles have therefore used amnesty programmes (or similar policy changes) to establish causal relationships. In this article, we propose a first systematic review of the empirical literature for the USA and Europe on the impact of legal status on different immigrants’ outcomes. We then present some new evidence of the relationship between labour market outcomes and legal status in the Italian context. In our empirical analysis, we first provide some descriptive evidence on differences in the outcomes for groups with different residence statuses, and we then exploit a specific amnesty programme to produce causal estimates of the impact of legal status. Our results confirm previous findings in the literature and show that the design of the specific amnesty analysed matters in shaping its effects.

Abstract. This paper analyses microdata from three different sources in order to quantify the impact of the economic recession on undocumented migrants in Italy and to compare their labour market outcomes in recent years with the performance of native workers and documented migrants. This study provides evidence for the first time for a dramatic deterioration of employment outcomes and housing conditions of undocumented migrants during the economic crisis started in 2008. In particular, the reduction in the share of employed workers is about three times larger among migrants lacking legal status than among legally resident migrants. Differently from what observed for this latter group, among undocumented migrants the fall in employment is similar for women and men. If migrant workers are generally more vulnerable in the labour market than natives, the lack of legal status is associated with even higher exposure to the detrimental effects of economic downturns.

Abstract. This article documents a strong connection between unemployment and mental distress using data from the Spanish National Health Survey. We exploit the collapse of the construction sector to identify the causal effect of job losses in different segments of the Spanish labor market. Our results suggest that an increase of the unemployment rate by 10 percentage points due to the breakdown in construction raised reported poor health and mental disorders in the affected population by 3 percentage points, respectively. We argue that the size of this effect responds to the fact that the construction sector was at the center of the economic recession. As a result, workers exposed to the negative labor demand shock faced very low chances of re-entering employment. We show that this led to long unemployment spells, stress, hopelessness, and feelings of uselessness. These effects point towards a potential channel for unemployment hysteresis. 

Abstract. This article introduces the Special Issue on “The Economics of Migration: Labour Market Impacts and Migration Policies”. In the paper, we summarize the selection of articles published in the Special Issue and place their contributions in the context of the main developments in this field. We have organized the articles into three broad thematic areas. The first set of papers provides novel evidence on migrant selection. The following group of articles delves into the core literature of the labour market impacts of immigration, with a particular focus on high-skilled immigration and selective immigration policies. A final group of papers deals with more specific - and often controversial – topics: refugee migration, undocumented migration and the political consequences of migrant flows. In the concluding remarks, we extract from the different papers some guidance for future migration policies. 

Abstract. We use novel survey data to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Libya. Our analysis compares the effects of the pandemic for displaced and non-displaced citizens, controlling for individual and household characteristics and geo-localized measures of economic activity and conflict intensity. In our sample, 9.5% of respondents report that a household member has been infected by COVID-19, while 24.7% of them have suffered economic damages and 14.6% have experienced negative health effects due to the pandemic. IDPs do not display higher incidence of COVID-19 relative to comparable non-displaced individuals, but are about 60% more likely to report negative economic and health impacts caused by the pandemic. We provide suggestive evidence that the larger damages suffered by IDPs can be explained by their weaker economic status - which leads to more food insecurity and indebtedness - and by the discrimination they face in accessing health care.

Abstract. Is naturalization an effective tool to boost refugees' labor market integration? We address this novel empirical question by exploring survey data from 21 European countries and leveraging variation in citizenship laws across countries, time, and migrant groups as a source of exogenous variation in the probability of naturalization. We find that obtaining citizen status allows refugees to close their gaps in labor market outcomes relative to non-refugee migrants while having non-significant effects on the latter group. We then further explore the heterogeneity of returns to citizenship in a Marginal Treatment Effect framework, showing that migrants with the lowest propensity to naturalize would benefit the most if they did. This reverse selection on gains can be explained by policy features that make it harder for more vulnerable migrant groups to obtain citizenship, suggesting that a relaxation of eligibility constraints would yield benefits for both migrants and host societies.

Abstract. This paper contributes to the literature on the Covid-19 effects on workers and labor markets by focusing on the experience of migrant key workers in EU countries. Our analysis, based on survey data on more than 3 million workers, explores three main aspects. First, we document the over-representation of migrant workers in key occupations, particularly in low-qualified roles. Second, we examine the selection into key occupations. According to our estimates, women are more likely to be key workers, the relationship with education is V-shaped, and EU and Extra EU migrants are, respectively, 12 and 15 percent more likely to be key workers than comparable natives. Finally, we estimate the impact of Covid-19 on the labor market, showing that migrant key workers had to extend their working hours during the pandemic and, nevertheless, faced a 2-3 times higher probability of being laid off relative to natives. Our findings imply that migrant workers played a crucial role in the response to the pandemic, but endured a harsher fate than native workers.

Abstract. Public opinion is strongly concerned about illegal migration, whereas employers may value undocumented immigrants as a desirable resource. Rational governments may try to balance these conflicting interests by selectively enforcing migration policies according to local labor demand. This paper provides the first empirical analysis of internal enforcement against undocumented immigrants. It identifies, for the first time, the causal impact of changes in labor demand on the intensity of government’s intervention. Using a new panel dataset, we estimate the employment elasticity of deportations: a 1% increase in local employment causes a 10-15% reduction in the number of immigrants removed from the area. We investigate the theoretical rationale of this empirical finding in a stylized model of internal enforcement in an economy with labor market rigidities. Within this setting, undocumented immigrants are hired as buffer-employment in periods of stronger labor demand.

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