This paper empirically investigates the impact of birthplace diversity on economic growth. We use panel data on US states over the 1960–2010 period. This rich data set allows us to better deal with endogeneity issues and to conduct a large set of robustness checks. Our results suggest that diversity among college-educated immigrants positively affects economic growth. We provide converging evidence pointing at the existence of skill complementarities between workers trained in different countries. These synergies result in better labor market outcomes for native workers and in higher productivity in the R&D sector. The gains from diversity are maximized when immigrants originate from economically or culturally distant countries (but not both), and when they acquired part of their secondary education abroad and their college education in the USA. Overall, a 10% increase in high-skilled diversity raises GDP per capita by about 6%. On the contrary, low-skilled diversity has insignificant effects.

This paper analyses whether international migrants contribute to foster innovation in developing countries by inducing a transfer of productive knowledge from destination to the migrants' home countries. Using the Economic Complexity Index as a proxy for the amount of productive knowledge embedded in each countries, and bilateral migrant stocks to 20 OECD destination countries, we show that international emigration is a strong channel of technological transmission. Diasporas foster the local adoption of new technologies by connecting high technology countries with low ones, reducing the uncertainty surrounding their profitability. Our empirical results support the fact that technological transfers are more likely to occur out of more technologically advanced destinations and when emigration rates particularly high.

This paper analyses whether the systematic disclosure of criminals’ origins in the press affects natives’ attitudes towards immigration. It takes advantage of the unilateral change in reporting policy announced by the German newspaper Sächsische Zeitung in July, 2016. Combining individual-level panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 2014 to 2018 with 402,819 crime-related articles in German newspapers and those newspapers’ market shares, we find that systematically mentioning the origins of criminals increases the relative salience of natives’ criminality and reduces natives’ concerns about immigration, breaking the implicit link between immigration and crime.

Which factors determine the performance of immigrants in the destination country labor market? Evidence in the literature suggests that discrimination may be a barrier to the economic assimilation of immigrants. However, depending on their country of origin, immigrants are heterogeneous with respect to the discrimination they face. This paper investigates how the attitude of natives affects immigrants' unemployment duration in Germany. Using individual level panel data from the German Socio Economic Panel from 1984 to 2012, we employ survival analysis methods to model immigrants' unemployment duration. We find that lower trust levels of natives towards the citizens of a given country, measured using Eurobarometer surveys, positively influence the unemployment duration of immigrants originating from this country. We show that this result is not driven by originspecific unobserved heterogeneity, and that it is robust to different definitions of unemployment and different specifications. The results of our paper highlight the fact that immigrants face different obstacles depending on their origin when it comes to integrating destination country labor markets.