Suchergebnisse

We investigate whether anti-immigrant attitudes affect migrant inflows in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Using longitudinal exhaustive data, we find that natives' hostility, particularly natives' propensity to discriminate on the labor market, reduces immigration. This effect is comparable to more conventional migration factors. We obtain robust results when we, for example, capture hostility with far-right parties' popularity instead and control for tighter immigration policies or multilateral resistance to migration. We find a stronger effect for EU-to-EU migrants, migrants from developed countries and linguistically close countries. Our results raise a challenge for policy makers when the demand for foreign workers and anti-immigrant sentiment are present.

This study contributes to the literature on destination-country consequences of international migration with investigations on the effects of immigration from new EU member states and Eastern Partnership countries on the economies of old EU member states over the years 1995-2010. Using a rich international migration dataset and an empirical model accounting for the endogeneity of migration flows we find positive and significant effects of post-enlargement migration flows from new EU member states on old member states' GDP, GDP per capita, and employment rate and a negative effect on output per worker. We also find small, but statistically significant negative effects of migration from Eastern Partnership countries on receiving countries' GDP, GDP per capita, employment rate, and capital stock, but a positive significant effect on capital-to-labor ratio. These results mark an economic success of the EU enlargements and EU's free movement of workers.

AbstractThis paper makes use of a linked employer–employee dataset to examine the evolution of wage inequality in the Czech Republic during 1998–2006. We find evidence of slightly increasing returns to human capital and diminishing gender inequality and document sharp increases in both within‐firm and between‐firm inequality. We investigate several hypotheses to explain these patterns: increased domestic and international competition, decentralized wage bargaining, skill‐biased technological change and a changing educational composition of the workforce. Domestic competition is found to lower within‐firm inequality whereas we find no evidence that increased international trade at the industry level is associated with higher between‐ or within‐firm wage inequality. The key factors driving the observed increase in wage inequality are increased educational sorting and the inflow of foreign firms to the Czech Republic.