Resumen de Social Spending and Immigration

Jordi Jofre Monseny, Pilar Sorribas Navarro, Javier Vázquez Grenno

• We estimate the effect of immigration on social spending of Spanish municipalities in 2006. This year belongs to a period in which Spain experienced an economic boom and a massive arrival of foreign-born population. We exploit the variation in immigration across Spanish municipalities and construct an instrument considering the historical location patterns of immigrants by country of origin. We do not find statistically significant effect of immigration on social expenditure. However, our results suggest that the political orientation of the municipal government has a significant effect on municipal social spending. Concretely, we find statistically significant that social per capita spending is higher in those municipalities where the Mayor belongs to a left-wing party.