Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/192922 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
KOF Working Papers No. 436
Publisher: 
ETH Zurich, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, Zurich
Abstract: 
An important goal of immigration policy is facilitating the entry and supply of workers whose skills are scarce in national labour markets. In recent decades, the introduction of information and communication technology [ICT] fuelled the demand for highly skilled workers at the expense of lower skill groups throughout the developed world. In this paper, we show that the skill mix of newly arriving immigrants strongly responded to this shift in the demand for skills. Exploiting the fact that different regions in Switzerland were differentially exposed to ICT due to their pre-ICT industrial composition, we present evidence suggesting more exposed regions experienced stronger growth in relative employment and wage premia for highly skilled workers between 1990 and 2010. We find robust evidence that regions with higher initial ICT exposure experienced a considerably stronger relative in influx of highly skilled immigrants. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that immigrants responded to skill-biased changes in economic opportunities. Complementing these findings, we document whether and how the response of immigrants to skill demand changed when Switzerland abolished immigration restrictions for European workers.
Subjects: 
immigrant sorting, international migration
routine-biased technical change
information and communication technology
skill supply
JEL: 
F22
J61
J24
J31
J23
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
5.09 MB





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