Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/36149 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 4438
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This paper examines the impact of the immigration of foreigners on domestic labour mobility. Since David Card's seminal study on the regional labour market impact of the Mariel Boatlift it is controversial whether domestic labour mobility equilibrates economic conditions across cities and regions. However, there is little or no evidence that natives leave destinations where migrants tend to cluster. In this paper we reconcile the existing evidence by taking another route. We analyze whether the immigration of foreigners replaces domestic mobility from poor to rich regions. We focus on Italy, which is characterized by market differences in earnings between the North and the South. Based on a panel cointegration approach we exploit the variance of international and internal migration over time for identifying potential displacement effects. The main finding is that, conditional on unemployment and wage differentials, the share of foreign workers in the labour force of the destination regions discourages internal labour mobility significantly. As a consequence, spatial correlation studies which use the variance of the foreigner share across region for identifying the wage and employment effects of immigration, tend to understate the actual immigration impact.
Subjects: 
International migration
domestic migration
labour markets
panel cointegration
Italy
JEL: 
F22
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
413.63 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.