Anette Haas (p), Kerstin Tanis

Martin Falk

With the knowledge in hand that immigrants’ location choices strongly depend upon the presence of other immigrants, we investigate the effect of spatial clustering on immigrants’ wage prospects over a 20-year period (1975-2010). We use a quasi-experimental setting of the guest worker programme that ensures exogenous location choices and, thus, validity of results. Following Borjas’ model of economic assimilation, the results suggest that similar immigrants in similar firms experience different outcomes depending on job location. From a life course perspective, immigrants, who were regionally allocated close to other immigrant with the same nationality, perform worse than do those immigrants allocated close to natives. The analyses control for structural differences between regions. Moreover, the effect of spatial clustering becomes even more negative with time of residence. Our findings are robust regarding two alternative measurements of spatial concentration (exposure index and relative clustering index) and an IV-estimation (IV: lagged spatial concentration measure).

Timo Mitze (p), Amber Naz , Nils Karl Sørensen

Anette Haas

We analyse the role of peer signals in explaining internal migration along the work-life cycle. In this context, peer signals are defined as age-specific labor disparities between alternative migration locations. While there is a large body of empirical research that has studied the migration response to aggregate local labor market disparities, the distinct novelty of this work is that we adopt an explicit work-life cycle perspective by testing for the strength of migration responses to these peer signals across age groups. Using data for internal migration flows and local labor market indicators in Denmark, our results show that peer signals are a significant factor in determining in the net in-migration rate of Danish municipalities in 2007-2015. In comparison, we do not observe significant effects when replicating the estimations with aggregate local labor market disparities instead of age group-specific peer signals. Moreover, while the estimation results generally support the neoclassical migration theory, we also detect significant alterations in the magnitude of the migration response across age groups. Similarly, rural-urban differences are found to be another key conditioning factor for the link between local labor market disparities and internal migration.

Bastian Heider (p), Stefan Siedentop, Peter Stroms

Timo Mitze

This paper examines the impact of foreign migration on regional disparities in population development in Germany by analysing recent spatial patterns and determinants at the county level. A counterfactual analysis shows that international migration has significantly contributed to counteract population shrinkage in German regions. However, immigration was mainly directed towards large cities and highly urbanized areas and has therefore reinforced the existing spatial disparities in population development. Our spatial regression models nonetheless reveal that international migrants are not per se attracted to large agglomerations. Controlling for a broad set of further variables, including the existence of ethnic peer groups, labour market characteristics, amenities and accessibility, we estimate that indicators of urbanization are not significantly or even negatively correlated to the net migration rates of international migrants. Moreover, the results strongly differ between the external and internal spatial migration patterns of foreigners as well between certain subgroups of migrants.

Martin Falk (p), Eva Hagsten

Bastian Heider

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