Bianca Biagi, Claudio Detotto (p), Alessandra Faggian

In human capital theory, better-educated individuals require higher returns for their investment, while in job search theory, better-educated people have higher reservation wages. Therefore, in considering the amount of investment in education and skills, individuals with high human capital (or individuals with high reservation wages) should migrate more than those with low human capital (lower reservation wages). This argument is known as the education selectivity of migration (Van Dijk et al., 1989, Clark and Cosgrove, 1991). According to the findings of applied research, individuals with high human capital should also be willing to migrate longer distances (Faggian and McCann, 2006, 2009; McCann et al., 2010). Overall, the theory predicts that younger and better-educated individuals tend to have a greater migratory attitude in order to obtain the highest return on investment in their education and skills acquisition (Sjaastad, 1962) or to have opportunities to achieve better social status (Fielding). Furthermore, a stream of literature finds that individuals with high skills will seek to migrate to locations with higher return to skills, whereas those with lower skills will desire to migrate to locations with lower returns to skills (Borjas et al., 1992; Giannetti, 2001; Hunt & Mueller, 2004). If this is true, it means that high and low skills migrants not necessarily will choose to locate in places where GDP is higher or unemployment is lower. Specifically, individuals with high skills will seek to migrate to locations that offers higher return to their skills, whereas those with lower skills will migrate to location with lower returns to skills because the lack of skills will not be penalized as heavily as would occur in the former type of locations (Borjas et al., 1992; Giannetti, 2001; Hunt & Mueller, 2004).
With this theoretical background, the main purpose of the paper is to analyse Italian inter-provincial migration flows classified by their ‘human capital content’ and explore their relationship with economic growth trends. Proxing human capital with years of education, we investigate whether and to what extent high- and low-human capital flows react to short and long run economic growth dynamics; and the consistency of the results of the present paper with findings of studies applied to different countries as well as previous applications to the Italian case. We perform the analysis using a small panel dataset on inter-provincial origin-destination flows by human capital, specifically we pull together four origin-destination matrixes for the years 1975-1985-1995-2005.

Viola Von Berlepsch (p), Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

Recent research looking at long-term migration to the United States of America (US) has found a very long-lasting and positive impact of migration on economic development at the local level. Areas in the US where migrants settled more than 100 years ago are still considerably more prosperous today than those that were bypassed by migration. The territorial prosperity of previous migration waves may have, in turn, acted as a magnet for new migrant waves, contributing to perpetuate a division between migration-prone and migration-averse areas.

In this paper we use US Census microdata from 1880 and 1910 and 1950, 1960 and 1970, aggregated at county level, in order to assess, first, the extent to which the first mass migration wave to the US – that of European migrants at the turn of the 20th century – has determined the settlement pattern of Latin American migration to the US in the second half of the 20th century, Second, the analysis focuses on whether coincidences – or lack of them – in the settlement patterns of migration waves taking place decades apart are a fundamental factor in shaping long-term economic performance.

The analysis, conducted using ordinary least squares and instrumental variable estimations, indicates that past US migration patterns create a path dependency that has affected the geography of future migration. Latin American migration to the US in the second half of the 20th century has been heavily influenced by the migration wave of their European predecessors, in spite of the very different nature of both migration waves. The results also show that Latin American migration has contributed to perpetuate the economic dynamism of those areas that have become migration prone, regardless of their prosperity at the time of migration.

Juan Soto (p)

We estimate the differential of Quality of Life (QOL) level for residents in Mexico located in the municipalities that border the US. We separate them first in two groups, those who commute within Mexico and to U.S. Then we split them in two additional groups depending on the commuting time, letting 2 hours as the threshold time. For each one of these three groups we estimate an individual QOL index following Roback (1982) framework, where commuting time as well as standard amenities like crime and temperature are considered for indexing housing prices and wages. We control the simultaneously problem by using a two-stage least square estimation. We find that those who commute more than two hours within Mexico have a wage premium over the rest of the groups, while premium for commuters to US is not significant different than that for internal commuters. These results open the discussion about what are the real gains to analyze the of cross-border commuting and whether is a feasible alternative to migration from Mexico to US. Moreover, these findings are in line with the reduction in migration flows detected along last official statistics as well with the reduction of transaction costs for those Mexican workers who choose to daily cross the border toward US.

Rafael González-Val (p)

We study the US city size distribution over space. This paper makes two contributions to the empirical literature on city size distributions. First, the paper uses data from different definitions of US cities in 2010 to study the distribution of cities in space, finding significant patterns of dispersion depending on city size. Second, the paper proposes a new distance-based approach to analyse the influence of distance on the city size distribution parameters. By using all the possible combinations of cities within a 300 miles radius area, results indicate that the Pareto distribution cannot be rejected in most of the cases regardless city sizes, and Zipf’s law holds (on average) for nearby urban areas (up to 75 miles distance). To check the robustness of the results we run placebo regressions, confirming the significant effect of geography on the Pareto exponent.