People to Jobs, Jobs to People: Global Mobility and Labor Migration
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | IZA Research Reports |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://docs.iza.org/report_pdfs/iza_report_74.pdf |
| Field | Economy |
| Description | The economic literature suggests that immigrants are more fluid than natives in responding to changing shortages in the labor market. We study the responsiveness of high- and low-skilled immigrants to labor market imbalances in the EU-15. The diversity across EU member states enables us to study immigrants' responsiveness across various institutional, economic and policy contexts. We confirm that, in general, the responsiveness of non-EU-15 immigrants exceeds that of the native workforce; and we find that this effect emerges in the low-skilled segment of the labor market. We find that this finding holds across a number of institutional, policy and economic contexts, among which we study the level of GDP, unemployment rate, employment protection, social expenditures, union density, collective bargaining coverage, immigration history, migration policy, and integration policy. The responsiveness of low-skilled EU-15 migrants is shown to be statistically significantly higher than that of the corresponding natives only in countries with above-the-median social expenditures, high employment protection, high bargaining coverage, or a more open migration policy. Regardless of whether they come from within or outside the EU-15, high-skilled immigrants' responsiveness to labor shortages is generally similar to that of the natives. On the other hand, high-skilled EU-15 immigrants (but not non-EU-15 immigrants or natives) are more responsive than their low-skilled counterparts. |
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