Resumen de Essays in the economics of migration
This thesis consists of three independent articles on the economics of migration. The three articles share an empirical approach to studying the labour market outcomes of immigrants, whether they be international migrants in developed countries, or internal migrants in developing countries.
Segregation of immigrants across workplaces has been widely documented, however the causes and consequences of segregation remain subject to conjecture. In the first chapter, I use social security data for the period 1990-2010 to study whether tipping points in the composition of industries can explain observed patterns of segregation across industries by ethnicity in Germany. I consider two tests for the existence of tipping points in the composition of local industries' workforces, one based on a regression discontinuity design (RDD) around a candidate tipping point, the other based on a threshold regression that includes an unknown breakpoint. I find only limited support for the existence of tipping dynamics in native employment flows using RDD methods and no evidence when estimating a threshold regression. The RDD evidence is strongest for the period 1990-1995, when immigrant inflows to Germany were largest. Furthermore, my findings suggest that inference methods previously used to test for the existence of tipping points in labour markets may have a tendency to over-reject the null of no tipping points. Taken together, my results may be cause for some scepticism about the existence of tipping points in labour markets.
In the second chapter, I turn to the consequences of workplace segregation. I use survey data matched to administrative records to study the effect of segregation in an immigrant's first job on her subsequent labour market outcomes. I argue that controlling for the wealth of pre-migration characteristics recorded in my survey data, not typically available in studies of immigrant outcomes, is sufficient to account for selection into high-conational firms. Both OLS and semi-parametric estimates indicate that a one-percentage-point increase in the share of conationals in an immigrant's first job is associated with 0.16--0.18-percentage-point lower employment rates in the medium- to longer-term, while there is no clear evidence of an earnings effect. Formal tests show that the results are robust to selection on unobservables. Differences in human capital acquisition do not appear to explain the employment effect, while there is some evidence that it is explained by differences in the quality of social network induced by differences in the initial workplace.
In the third and final chapter, I study rural-urban migration in the developing world. There are large earnings gaps between urban and rural locations in the developing world, raising the question of why more rural residents do not emigrate. I use an event study comparing urban migrants with siblings who stayed back to estimate the effect of urban migration on the labour market outcomes of urban migrants in Indonesia. I find that migrants experience a positive but transient employment boost and more permanent occupational upgrading relative to their siblings. I then compare migrants to comparable urban natives, identified using a matching procedure, to establish that, unlike international migrants, urban migrants do not experience a labour market penalty relative to urban natives. The evidence suggests that barriers to rural-urban migration are higher than one would infer from simple comparisons of urban and rural wages.
