CE26 - Innovation, Travail

Migration And Labor supplY wheN culturE matterS – MALYNES

MALYNES

Immigration within Europe has greatly increased in the last decades. The literature concludes that migrants may be very beneficial to the labor supply of the destination countries. MALYNES recognizes that, to value the effective contribution of migrants to the destination economy, the simultaneity of the individual decision to supply labor to other important family choices e.g. regarding marriage, fertility, investments in children, allocation of tasks within the family has to be accounted for.

The objective of the project is to propose an encompassing framework suited to predict the future effects of migration on labor supply in the European Union.

The project tackles three main issues. The first one is creating knowledge about future scenarios regarding labor mobility and migration in Europe. These scenarios depend on both natives’ perceptions of the value of immigration, and political support towards an open migration policy.<br />The second one is applying well-known empirical approaches from the cultural economics literature to the detailed information available from European time use and register data. In this way, it is deriving a cross-cultural “map” of the most important values and preferences (many of them related to family behaviors) that affect the individual labor supply decision. Third, it tackles the development of a quantitative theory for the impact of migration on labor supply. The model incorporates cultural differences as a key ingredient of behaviors like fertility, marriage and time use of both migrant and native families in a wide variety of European countries. The parameters of the model are to be estimated using structural estimation techniques.

Task 1. Creating knowledge about future scenarios regarding migration and migration policy in Europe.We analyze the impact of immigrants on political attitudes of European natives measured by the “salience” of migration in the political debate and the “revealed political preferences” of natives regarding migration policy in Europe. The methods used are those proper of the economic literature on the impact of migration on economic and political outcomes.

Task 2. Applying the scientific methods coming from the cultural economics literature to derive a cross-cultural map of values and preferences that are relevant to labor supply decisions. The objective of this task is to investigate the cultural determinants of important family choices, which are simultaneous to the individual labor supply decision. The methods used are those the characterize the cultural economics literature based upon the epidemiological approach.

Task 3. Developing a quantitative model able to predict the impact of migration on labor supply, enriched by cross-cultural differences between individuals. This task aims at developing a quantitative theory able to predict the impact of migration on labor supply, enriched by cultural differences between individuals. We will use this theory for structural estimations of the deep parameters attached to decisions on time use, marriage and fertility.

In general, the advancement state of the project is satisfactory. Task 1 delivered already many interesting results by looking at the effects of migration on voting at national elections for parties with opposite views on the process of European integration and Internationalism in general. Research on this task uncovered the following main facts:
(1) Exposure to immigration by low and highly educated individuals strongly influences the voting behaviour of European natives (i.e. locals born in their country of residence) and have opposite effects: immigration by low-skilled individuals induces native voters to support nationalist - Eurosceptical parties, willing to close borders. Conversely immigration by highly educated individuals induces native voters to support parties favourable to European integration.
(2) Immigrants themselves vote for parties with open attitudes towards the European Union and internationalism compared to native citizens, which tend to have more conservative views. Migrant-to-native differences in voting behaviour are partly determined by cultural factors. The focus here is on second generation immigrants, as these had the highest chances to gain full voting rights in the destination.

All in all, these two important results point to the migration phenomenon being critical to future developments of the European integration, internationalism and future migration/mobility in Europe. Among the various scenarios that will provide the basis for Task 3, we derived a particularly interesting one with balanced inflows of low and high skilled migration. According to this scenario, such balanced inflows determine political support to pro-European and internationalist parties. We argue that support to these parties is likely to generate political decisions that further increase the mobility of individuals and workers across European countries.

During the first 18 months of the project, many objectives, both in terms of academic results, and their dissemination have already been reached. We have reached important milestones in Task 1. We are currently obtaining important results on Task 2, both in terms of working paper publications and in terms of collection of new original data. All these work will be further developed during the next months and will provide the basis to the future stages (Task 3) of the project.

Moriconi, S., Peri, G., and Pozzoli, D. (2020). The Role of Institutions and Immigrant Networks in Firms' Offshoring Decisions. Canadian Journal of Economics (forthcoming).
Iga Magda & Jan Gromadzki & Simone Moriconi, (2020). «Firms and wage inequality in Central and Eastern Europe,« Journal of Comparative Economics (forthcoming).
Moriconi S., Peri g. and R. Turati (2019),«Immigration and Voting for Redistribution: Evidence from European Elections«, Labour Economics 61 (2019) 101765.
Moriconi S. and G. Peri (2019),«Country-Specific Preferences and Employment Rates in Europe«, European Economic Review Volume 116, July 2019, Pages 1-27.
Baudin T., de la Croix D. and Gobbi P. (2020), Endogenous childlessness and stages of development.
T. Baudin and R. Stelter (2020), The rural exodus and the rise of Europe,
T. Baudin and Koyel Sarkar (2020), Education and childlessness in India,
C. Senik and N. Friedman-Sokuler (2020) From Pink-Collar to Lab Coat: Cultural Persistence and Diffusion of Socialist Gender Norms, IZA DP No. 13385.

Immigration within Europe has greatly increased in the last decades. Migrants may be very beneficial to the labor supply of the destination countries e.g. by increasing diversity of productive skills in the labor market (Ortega and Peri, 2014), raising productivity levels and creating new employment opportunities to be enjoyed by natives too (Peri and Sparber 2009; Docquier et al., 2014). The simultaneity of the individual decision to supply labor with other important family choices e.g. regarding marriage, fertility, investments in children, and allocation of tasks within the family shapes the contribution of migrants to the destination economy. These choices depend on values, beliefs and preferences partly rooted into individuals’ “culture”. This term encompasses the broad set of shared knowledge, understanding, and practice according the definition by Fernández (2009). These are preferences for leisure vs. work or consumption, altruism, and beliefs regarding individual roles in the family and the labor market. The relevance of cultural factors to economic decisions is nowadays undisputed; nevertheless, the way we treat and integrate them into models suited to make predictions regarding the effects of immigrants coming from different cultural backgrounds on the long-term patterns of labor supply in European destination countries remains largely unsatisfactory.

The objective of the project is to propose an encompassing framework suited to predict the future effects of migration on labor supply in destination countries from the European Union, by modelling the multiple dimensions of the labor supply decision of an individual, whose preferences and values are shaped by culture. For the present project, we define as a migrant one individual that is resident in a different country from her/his country of origin (by symmetry, a native is resident in her/his country of origin). In line with the cultural economics’ literature, we identify the country of origin of the migrant by the country of birth of the first generation of migrant’s ancestors we observe (e.g. migrant’s parents, grandparents etc.).

MALYNES will pursue this general objective following a three-fold strategy. First, it will create knowledge about future scenarios regarding labor mobility and migration in Europe, which depend on natives’ perceptions of the value of immigration, and political support towards an open migration policy. Second, it will apply well-known empirical approaches from the cultural economics literature to the detailed information available from European time use and register data. In this way, it will derive a cross-cultural and cross-generational “map” of the most important values and preferences (many of them related to within family behaviors) that have bearings on individual labor supply decision. Third, it will develop a quantitative theory for the impact of migration on labor supply. The model will incorporate cultural differences as a key ingredient of family behaviors like fertility, marriage and time use of both migrant and native families in a wide variety of European countries. We will estimate the quantitative model through structural estimation techniques.

Project coordination

Simone Moriconi (INSTITUT ECONOMIE SCIENTIFIQUE GEST)

The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.

Partner

IESEG INSTITUT ECONOMIE SCIENTIFIQUE GEST

Help of the ANR 250,796 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project: February 2019 - 48 Months

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