Maria Abreu (p), Viktor Venhorst

Davide Fiaschi

This paper focuses on the little-researched topic of the psychological drivers of migration, in particular, of the degree to which the personality traits of individuals and the psychological characteristics of places drive migration flows. We incorporate insights from personality psychology into a human capital model of migration, and analyse in particular the relationship between the personality trait of Openness to Experience (defined as the tendency to be open to new aesthetic, cultural, or intellectual experiences) and migration patterns. Our analysis seeks to explain the migration patterns of recent graduates, those individuals who recently finished their studies and are seeking their first employment contract. We find that those individuals who are likely to have higher levels of openness, such as arts students, and those from top universities and with top grades, are more likely to be attracted by open places. We also find the likely reward of these moves is a dynamic effect on earnings, suggesting a learning effect, for migrants, and a static effect for non-migrants.

Bianca Biagi, Julien Ciucci, Claudio Detotto (p), Alessandra Faggian

Maria Abreu

see extended abstract

Ivan Etzo (p), Carla Massidda , Romano Piras

Claudio Detotto

This paper investigates the existence of complementarities between immigrant and native workers across sectors in Italy during the period 2011-2016. The analysis is based on a production function framework where the aggregate labor is the result of a nested-CES which allows us to estimate the elasticity of substitution between immigrants and native workers with same education-experience level by sector. The main contribution of the paper is to provide an estimate of the substitutability between natives and immigrants of similar education and experience level by sector. The aggregate estimate is equal to 20, thus in line with the aggregate value estimated for US by Ottaviano and Peri (2012) using a similar approach. Interestingly, once the estimates are carried out at sector level the main results suggest the existence of strong differences across the 12 sectors considered in our analysis. A finite and statistically significant elasticity of substitution is found for the following five sectors: Five sectors show imperfect substitutability between native and immigrant workers: Manufacturing, mining and quarrying, Electricity, Gas and water supply; Wholesale and retail trade; Hotel and Restaurants; Financial services and insurance; Other community, social and personal services activities. These results are important because they imply that an increase in the foreign labor supply is likely to have different impact on wages depending on the distribution of immigrant workers across sectors.

Davide Fiaschi (p), Cristina Tealdi , Angela Parenti

Ivan Etzo

Migrants self-selection is one of the most fundamental issues in the economics of migration, with highly relevant policy implications. Even though it has been widely recognized that migrants are not randomly selected from the populations of the origin countries, often both the theoretical and the empirical literature ignores the fact that immigrants are self-selected. The research done on self-selection focuses on two main questions: first, whether and to what extent migrants and non-migrants differ in their characteristics and second, on the reasons why these differences exist. The theoretical foundation for studying the causes of self-selection is the Roy-model, which Borjas (1987) has applied to migration. He developed a model of immigrant self-selection where the focus is on selectivity in unobserved characteristics. In his model, the fundamental driver of migration is the relative returns to skill in origin and destination countries. He claims that if earnings between the destination and the origin countries are positively correlated, whenever the destination country has more income inequality then the origin country, high-skilled migrants benefit the most for migrating, and hence a positive selection is observed. The opposite is true if earnings are more dispersed in the origin country. This result has important policy implications: since earnings inequality is lower in rich counties compared to poor countries on average, the Borjas model predicts that migrants from poor countries are unfavourably selected with regard to their skill levels. The empirical testing of this model, however, resulted in controversial results in the literature.
For the case of Italy, the evidence is little and ambiguous. The only two papers on selective migration from the South of the country to the North in the period 1980s-early 2000s point at opposite results. In this paper, we aim at contributing to the debate on the selective migration in Italy. To achieve this goal, we use a random utility model where the decision to migrate from one region to another depends on the difference in the return of education between the two regions. Due to the lack of individual data, we use transition probabilities at regional level for different levels of human capital to estimate the sign of the self-selection of migrants among the Italian regions for the period 1992-2015. We find evidence of strong self-selection in the Italian inter-regional migration, and of its significant changes over time. We conclude drawing some implications of our analysis for regional convergence and policy recommendations.