Skill Formation,Immigration and European Integration: The Politics of the UK Growth Model

ABSTRACT

While a reluctant European player now heading for the Exit, the UK was also an enthusiastic adopter of several key EU economic policies – namely, the skills and technology policies of Agenda 2020 and labour mobility. These initiatives worked with existing British policy, and structural biases, to exacerbate the already bifurcated structure of UK capitalism – between the high-paid technology and financial services sector on the one hand, and low-cost, low-wage sectors on the other hand. In particular, and central to the argument of this paper, immigration from Eastern and Central Europe after 2004 helped to sustain low-cost manufacturing and services industries by undermining firms’ incentives to invest in training. This combined with endemic failures in the UK’s skills system, which is heavily geared towards producing graduates with general skills but neglects the needs of mid and lower segments of the labour market. EU integration, therefore, exacerbated cleavages over skills between high- and low-productivity sectors and may have contributed to social divisions that led to Brexit.     

后靠式移民对收入影响的研究:基于断点回归的估计

基于断点回归对后靠式移民政策的收入效应进行实证研究。研究结果显示移民政策对于涉及群体存在显著的负收入效应,移民使得涉及家庭收入减少超过3000元;相对于从事农业生计家庭超过4000元的收入损失,从事非农业生计策略的家庭具有更高的抗政策波动能力,损失1800元左右远小于农业生计策略;移民对于不同收入水平家庭影响不尽相同,整体上呈现为倒U型。     

Refugee Immigration and Total Factor Productivity

This paper uses panel cointegration and causality techniques to examine the long-run relationship between refuge immigration and total factor productivity (TFP), a relationship that has not yet been examined in the literature. It is found that refugee immigration has, on average, a positive long-run effect on TFP, suggesting that refuge immigration increases the diversity of skills and ideas available to society as a whole, which in turn promotes specialization and innovation. It is also found that causality is unidirectional from refugee immigration to TFP, suggesting that refugees are primarily motivated by the push factor of persecution in the source country rather than by productivity (and hence welfare) gains as a potential pull factor in the destination country.     

Education reform and education gaps

We estimate the causal effect of the Italian 2009 “Gelmini” education reform on four academic performance gaps relating to immigration status, gender, parental social status, and parental education. The reform led to a reduction in the number of teachers and an increase in class size. Lags in implementing the reform for different grades is used to specify a difference-in-difference identification strategy. We find that the reform had a statistically and economically significant effect on the immigrant-native gap and on the gender gap, but not on the gap between students with more and less favourable family background. Particularly, our findings show that students with an immigration background were the main losers from the Gelmini reform.     

The drowning-refugee effect: media salience and xenophobic attitudes

We study whether salient media coverage of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean affects individual xenophobic attitudes. We combine a randomized survey experiment – a variant of the classic ‘trolley dilemma’ – that implicitly elicits individual attitudes towards foreigners, with variation in interview timing, and find that such issue salience significantly decreases xenophobic attitudes by 2.2 percentage points. Our results thus support the idea that exposure to news describing immigrants as victims (instead of a threat) can significantly affect public opinion and mitigate bias against immigrants.     

Wage Assimilation of Foreigners: Which Factors Close the Gap? Evidence From Germany

This study analyzes the development of the wages of male foreign workers from all important sending countries across time using longitudinal employment register data. A cohort analysis of the individuals entering the German labor market in the years 1999 to 2001 indicates that the raw wage gap of migrants compared to native Germans decreases by 14 log percentage points in the first eight years. The results of a decomposition method based on fixed effects regression models give evidence that this wage adjustment is mostly due to time‐varying observable characteristics. Selective return migration, and the trend effects play no role for the aggregate. We find that wage assimilation happens mainly through three channels: first, through the accumulation of firm‐specific human capital, which explains approximately 40 percent; second, search gains are approximately the same order of magnitude; and third, the accumulation of general human capital explains one‐fifth of the assimilation. We further demonstrate that the importance of these channels differs substantially by the origin groups.     

人口分布、隔离指数及其地理视角——以上海市外来人口分布为例

人口分布具有强烈的地理性,但是相应的空间变动却常常被主流学派所忽视。将空间性思维加入到人口分布的研究当中,关注于不同群体人口分布的局部空间变动,并使用相应的空间性指标进行分析。对这些空间性指标进行了理论探讨,并将其应用于上海市外来人口分布的实证研究中。上海市外来人口主要聚集在距离中心城区10-20公里范围内的近郊区,呈现出有规律性的环状分布。使用空间性的分析指标能够探测出城市社会空间分布的结构,并分析其动力演化机制,为构建和谐的城市社会提供研究依据。     

生态脆弱区的“生态移民”模式探索—北京延庆县大楝树村生态移民工作调查

“生态移民”旨在将生态脆弱区的生态超载人口迁到生态承载能力高的农业区或城镇郊区,从而改变山区群众传统的生活方式,并缓解人口对生态环境的压力,保护生态环境,使人口、资源、环境与社会经济协调发展。北京市延庆县2004年以来在山区泥石流易发区实施生态移民计划,收效明显。本文即是对该县千家店镇大楝树行政村的生态移民情况的调查。调查涉及到了生态移民的各种利弊因素及其原因,并提出了相应的对策建议,以期探索生态脆弱区“生态移民”的最佳模式。     

Anywhere they go,we go: Immigration inflow's impact on co-ethnic natives in the U.S.

Using data from the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses and the American Community Survey five-year sample for 2006–2010, we examine the impacts of immigration inflows on the migration patterns of co-ethnic natives in the United States. We explore whether the outcomes are driven by changes in labor market returns in the receiving cities or sociocultural benefits of being surrounded by co-ethnics. We find that a higher ethnicity-specific immigrant population share within a city increases the population share of both co-ethnic natives who remain in the receiving cities and co-ethnic natives who migrate into these cities, relative to natives of other ancestries. All baseline results survive robustness and falsification tests, and instrumental variable estimations. Through the heterogeneous effects, we find that the sociocultural benefits, such as language and ethnic goods that immigrants bring to receiving cities, are the potential channels that attract co-ethnic natives to migrate towards those enclaves.     

Migration and labour markets in OECD countries: a panel cointegration approach

This article examines the interaction between immigration and the host labour market of 14 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries using nonstationary panel data methodology. We estimate a trivariate Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) and derive causality tests to simultaneously assess the long- and short-term macroeconomic impact of newcomers on wages and unemployment levels in the host country. The results suggest that an increase of migrants is likely to increase wages in the destination countries in the short run but to increase them in the long run. There is no evidence of adverse effects on unemployment due to immigration in short and long-term except for Anglo-Saxon countries in the short term. Our findings also show that immigration is conditioned by levels of unemployment and wages especially in Anglo-Saxon countries.