International Emigrant Selection on Occupational Skills

Patt, Alexander; Ruhose, Jens; Wiederhold, Simon; Flores, Miguel

doi:10.1093/jeea/jvaa032

“…The selection of university graduates is consistent with the predictions of the Borjas model; in fact, migrants to less equal countries have higher predicted earnings, while migrants to more equal countries have lower predicted earnings. Using alternative measures of skills, see also Patt et al (2017) where occupational skills (manual vs cognitive) capture economic incentives to emigrate from Mexico.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emigrant selection and wages: The case of Poland

Rosso

¹

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, I use a unique individual-level pre-migration labour market dataset for Poland to examine emigrant selection in two major destination countries, the United Kingdom and Germany. I compare the pre-migration observable and unobservable characteristics of emigrants with those of non-emigrants in Poland. First, I find that Polish emigrants to the UK are more similarly educated to non-emigrants while being more negatively selected on residual wages. Second, emigrants to Germany are disproportionately more likely to fall in the middle of the education distribution but they are no different than non-emigrants in terms of unobservable skills. The familiar predictions of the Borjas (1987) model allow me to partially undercover the mechanism driving the selection patterns of Polish emigrants. I contribute to the migrant selection literature by providing additional evidence on how migrants respond to differences in both labour markets and migration policies across countries.

show abstract

“…Liebig and Sousa-Poza (2004) support this claim in an analysis of cross-country survey data on migration intentions. Recent studies that review the empirical literature and also test this theory are Parey et al (2017) and Patt et al (2017).…”

Section: Returns To Skills and Self-selection Of Migrantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Income redistribution and self-selection of immigrants

Corneo

¹

,

Neidhöfer

²

2021

Journal of Public Economics

1

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We analyze the effects of governmental redistribution of income on migration patterns, using an Italian administrative dataset that includes information on almost every Italian citizen living abroad. Since Italy takes a middle ground in terms of redistribution, both the welfare-magnet effect from more redistributive countries and the propensity of the high-skilled to settle in countries with lower taxes can be empirically studied. Our findings confirm the hypothesis that destination countries with more redistribution receive a negative selection of Italian migrants. This holds true after accounting for many individual and country level covariates, migration costs, and when testing for stochastic dominance of the skill distributions of migrants and stayers. Policy simulations are run in order to gauge the magnitude of these migration effects. Based on estimated elasticities, we find that sizable increases in the amount of redistribution in Italy have small effects on the skill composition of the resident population.

show abstract

“…Liebig and Sousa-Poza (2004) support this claim in an analysis of cross-country survey data on migration intentions. Recent studies that review the empirical literature and also test this theory are Parey et al (2017) and Patt et al (2017).…”

Section: Returns To Skills and Self-selection Of Migrantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Income Redistribution and Self-Selection of Immigrants

Corneo

¹

,

Neidhöfer

²

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We analyze the effects of governmental redistribution of income on migration patterns, using an Italian administrative dataset that includes information on almost every Italian citizen living abroad. Since Italy takes a middle ground in terms of redistribution, both the welfare-magnet effect from more redistributive countries and the propensity of the high-skilled to settle in countries with lower taxes can be empirically studied. Our findings confirm the hypothesis that destination countries with more redistribution receive a negative selection of Italian migrants. This holds true after accounting for many individual and country level covariates, migration costs, and when testing for stochastic dominance of the skill distributions of migrants and stayers. Policy simulations are run in order to gauge the magnitude of these migration effects. Based on estimated elasticities, we find that sizable increases in the amount of redistribution in Italy have small effects on the skill composition of the resident population.

show abstract

International Emigrant Selection on Occupational Skills

Cited by 16 publications

References 81 publications

Emigrant selection and wages: The case of Poland

Emigrant selection and wages: The case of Poland

Income redistribution and self-selection of immigrants

Income Redistribution and Self-Selection of Immigrants

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About