دانلود رایگان مقاله اثرات مهاجرت در بازار کار اصطکاکی: نظریه و شواهد تجربی از کشورهای اتحادیه اروپا

abstract

Immigrants are newcomers in a labor market. As a consequence, they lack host-countryspecific labor market knowledge and other country-specific and not directly productive valuable assets affecting their relative bargaining position with employers. We introduce this simple observation into a search and matching model of the labor market and show that immigrants increase the employment prospects of competing natives. To test the predictions of our model, we exploit yearly variations between 1998 and 2004 in the share of immigrants within occupations in 13 European countries. We identify the impact of immigrants on natives' employment rate using an instrumental variable strategy based on historical settlement patterns across host countries and occupations by origin country. We find that natives' employment rate increases in occupations and sectors receiving more immigrants. Moreover, we show that this effect varies depending on immigrants' characteristics and on host country labor market institutions which affect relative reservation wages.

8. Conclusion

The increasing contribution of immigrants to the labor force is among the most important contemporaneous labor supply shocks facing European labor markets. To date, most of the literature has discussed the labor market consequences of such shocks using a standard neoclassical labor-supply labor-demand framework. However, this approach does not allow to introduce important differences in non-productive assets between immigrants and natives. We have shown in this paper that, once introduced into a frictional labor market, differences in host-country-specific assets between immigrants and natives can reverse the conclusions reached by the standard model: in the short run, immigrants improve the employment prospects of competing native workers. Thus, instead of crowding out natives, immigrants may instead crowd in natives in sectors and occupations to which they contribute. The employment creation effect has been found more important for new immigrants, for immigrants from non-EU15 countries, and for countries that display large differences in the unemployment benefit take-up rate between similar immigrants and natives. Overall, these results highlight that immigrants may lack host-country-specific assets, which explains their positive impact on natives' employment.