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As recent immigration flows are reshaping the host countries workforce composition, this paper aims to assess whether age composition and skill adjustment dynamics play a relevant role in the welfare impact of immigration. To this end, we build and simulate a search and matching model that allows for endogenous natives’ skill acquisition and intergenerational transfers to analyze the welfare effects of immigration on a selected group of 19 OECD countries. The obtained results are then compared with those obtained under different assumptions on age composition and skill adjustment dynamics. Our comparative statics analysis shows that stronger job creation effects take place when natives adjust their skill in response to immigration. Moreover, taking into account age composition plays a key role in assessing the fiscal impact of immigration, which turns out to be positive when we include intergenerational transfers to retirees and immigration is high-skilled. Finally, we find that our model yields more optimistic welfare effects than standard search models that abstract from skill decision and intergenerational redistribution.

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General equilibrium models are frequently used to estimate the effect of immigration on welfare and inequality in the host country. Existing studies differ in the way they formalize the labor market implications for natives, which in turn govern the strength of the other transmission mechanisms. To assess the extent to which the choice of the labor market specification influences the findings, we build an encompassing model that distinguishes between broad classes of individuals. We calibrate it for 20 selected OECD member states, and compare several specifications involving different assumptions on labor supply decisions, unemployment rates, and wage formation, as well as different calibration strategies. The size and the sign of the average welfare and distributional effects of immigration are robust to the labor market specification. Endogenizing unemployment and participation rates leads to slightly better welfare and distributional effects in most OECD countries but overall, adding margins of labor market adjustment barely affects the findings of models based on simpler assumptions.