Suchergebnisse

This article analyses the labour market integration of newly arrived immigrants in the UK labour market, based on data from the UK Labour Force Survey. We focus on immigrants who arrived in the United Kingdom since 2000 and distinguish different cohorts based on the year of their arrival in the country. We examine the extent to which these new arrivals were able to enter work and move up into skilled jobs, and analyse the sectors of the economy that have proved most amenable to this progression. The analysis indicates that these new arrivals fared relatively well in the workforce. In part as a result of their relative youth and high education levels, many new arrivals (especially those from the European Union and in particular the EU10 countries) moved straight into work.

This paper provides new evidence on how the presence of immigrant peers in the classroom affects native student achievement. The analysis is based on longitudinal administrative data on two cohorts of vocational training students in Italy's largest region. Vocational training institutions provide the ideal setting for studying these effects because they attract not only disproportionately high shares of immigrants but also the lowest ability native students. We adopt a value added model, and exploit within-school variation both within and across cohorts for identification. Our results show small negative average effects on maths test scores that are larger for low ability native students, strongly non-linear and only observable in classes with a high (top 20%) immigrant concentration. These outcomes are driven by classes with a high average linguistic distance between immigrants and natives, with no apparent additional role played by ethnic diversity.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically assess whether immigrants suffer from unequal access to health care services, that add to prevailing socioeconomic barriers to care. Design/methodology/approach: Using a uniquely rich Italian health survey, the authors estimate the correlation between immigrant status and the probability of accessing health services, conditional on a rich set of individual and territorial characteristics. Findings: Results show that foreigners are more likely to contact emergency services and less likely to visit specialist doctors and use preventive care. Similar results hold for second-generation immigrants. Originality/value: The authors discuss the sources of observed inequities and suggest tentative policy implications to promote equal access.

We develop a model to understand the trade–offs faced by an elected representative in supporting an amnesty when a restrictive immigration policy is in place. We show that an amnesty is more desirable the more restricted are the occupational opportunities of undocumented immigrants and the smaller is the fiscal leakage to undocumented immigrants via the welfare state. Empirical evidence based on the voting behavior of U.S. Congressmen on the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 provides strong support for the predictions of our theoretical model.

We study the labour market performance of refugees vis-à-vis comparable migrants across 20 European countries and over time. In the first part of our analysis, we document that labour market outcomes for refugees are consistently worse than those for other migrants. Refugees are 11.6% less likely to have a job and 22% more likely to be unemployed than other migrants with similar characteristics. Their income, occupational quality and labour market participation are also relatively weaker. These gaps are larger relative to economic than non-economic migrants, and persist until about 10–15 years after immigration. In the second part of our analysis, we investigate the role of economic conditions and migration and asylum policy regimes at the time of arrival in shaping integration paths of refugees. First, we find that immigrating in a recession produces scarring effects for all migrants but no differential effect for forced migrants, leaving little role for this channel to explain observed refugee gaps. Secondly, we focus on the impact on refugees of being subject to spatial dispersal policies. Our estimates imply that dispersed refugees experience a persistent impact on their residential choices and substantial long run losses in their economic integration with respect to non-dispersed refugees.

In this paper, we exploit pension reform-induced changes in retirement eligibility requirements to assess the role of grandparental childcare availability in the labor force participation of women with children under 15. Our analysis shows that, among the women studied, those whose own mothers are retirement eligible have a 11% higher probability of being in the labor force than those whose mothers are ineligible. The pension eligibility of maternal grandfathers and paternal grandparents, however, has no significant effect on the women's labor force participation.We also demonstrate that the eligibility of maternal grandmothers mainly captures the effect of their availability for childcare. Hence, pension reforms, by potentially robbing households of an important source of flexible, low-cost childcare, could have unintended negative consequences for the employment rates of women with young children.

This article estimates the causal effect of the prospect of legal status on the employment outcomes of undocumented immigrants. The identification strategy exploits a natural experiment provided by an Italian amnesty program that introduced an exogenous discontinuity in eligibility based on date of arrival. The authors find that immigrants who are potentially eligible for legal status under the amnesty program have a significantly higher probability of being employed relative to undocumented immigrants who are not eligible. The size of the estimated effect is equivalent to about half the increase in employment that undocumented immigrants in our sample normally experience during their first year in Italy. These findings are robust to several checks and falsification exercises.

In this paper, we analyse the effect of emigration from Poland on Polish wages. Focusing on the 1998-2007 period for Poland, we use a unique dataset that contains information about household members who are currently living abroad, which allows us to develop region-specific emigration rates and to estimate the effect of emigration on wages using within-region variation. Our findings show that emigration led to a slight increase in wages for high- and medium-skilled workers, which are the two groups with the largest relative outmigration rates. Workers at the low end of the skill distribution might have experienced wage decreases.