The use of bilateral data for the analysis of international migration is at the same time a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because the dyadic dimension of the data allows researchers to ...address a number of previously unanswered questions, but it is also a curse for the various analytical challenges it gives rise to. This paper presents the theoretical foundations of the estimation of gravity models of international migration, and the main difficulties that have to be tackled in the econometric analysis, such as the nature of migration data, how to account for multilateral resistance to migration or endogeneity. We also review some empirical evidence that has considered these issues.
Multilateral resistance to migration Bertoli, Simone; Fernández-Huertas Moraga, Jesús
Journal of development economics,
05/2013, Letnik:
102, Številka:
3
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The rate of migration observed between two countries does not depend solely on their relative attractiveness, but also on the one of alternative destinations. Following the trade literature, we term ...the influence exerted by other destinations on bilateral flows as Multilateral Resistance to Migration, and we show how it can be accounted for when estimating the determinants of migration rates in the context of a general individual random utility maximization model. We propose the use of the Common Correlated Effects estimator (Pesaran, 2006) and apply it to high-frequency data on the Spanish immigration boom between 1997 and 2009. Compared to more restrictive estimation strategies developed in the literature, the bias goes in the expected direction: we find a smaller effect of GDP per capita and a larger effect of migration policies on bilateral rates.
New evidence on emigrant selection Moraga, Jesús Fernández-Huertas
The review of economics and statistics,
02/2011, Letnik:
93, Številka:
1
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This paper examines the extent to which Mexican emigrants to the United States are negatively selected. Previous studies have been limited by the lack of nationally representative longitudinal data. ...This one uses a newly available household survey, that identifies emigrants before they leave. On average, U.S.-bound Mexican emigrants from 2000 to 2004 earn lower wages and have less (more for females) schooling than nonmigrant Mexicans, evidence of negative selection. This argues against Chiquiar and Hanson's (2005) findings. The discrepancy is primarily due to an undercount of unskilled migrants in U.S. sources and secondarily to the omission of unobservables in their methodology.
Rational inattention and migration decisions Bertoli, Simone; Moraga, Jesús Fernández-Huertas; Guichard, Lucas
Journal of international economics,
09/2020, Letnik:
126
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Acquiring information about destinations can be costly for migrants. We model information frictions in the rational inattention framework and obtain a closed-form expression for a migration gravity ...equation that we bring to the data. The model predicts that flows from countries with a higher cost of information or stronger priors are less responsive to variations in economic conditions in the various destinations, as migrants rationally get less information before deciding where to move. The econometric analysis reveals systematic heterogeneity in the pro-cyclical behavior of migration flows across origins that is consistent with the existence of information frictions.
The European crisis and migration to Germany Bertoli, Simone; Brücker, Herbert; Fernández-Huertas Moraga, Jesús
Regional science and urban economics,
09/2016, Letnik:
60
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•Germany became the second-largest migrant destination in the OECD by 2014.•We analyze the determinants of the surge in migration from European countries to Germany.•Migration is predominantly ...temporary in nature.•We explore the implications of this for the estimation of gravity models.•Expectations on future economic conditions significantly affect migration flows.
The size of migration flows to Germany from other European countries surged in the aftermath of the 2010 European crisis, and this paper explores the main determinants of this large increase. International migrants tend to move more than once in their lives, and migration episodes to Germany make no exception in this respect. This paper explores some relevant implications of this simple observation for the estimation of gravity models, which is done here with bilateral monthly migration data. We demonstrate that ignoring the sequential nature of migration decisions gives rise to multilateral resistance to migration, thus substantially biasing the estimates. We also show that the expectations about future economic conditions at origin significantly influence bilateral migration flows to Germany.
The current European Union (EU) asylum policy is widely seen as ineffective and unfair. We propose an EU-wide market for tradable quotas on both refugees and asylum seekers coupled with a matching ...mechanism linking countries' and migrants' preferences. We show that the proposed system can go a long way towards addressing the shortcomings of the current system. We illustrate this claim using the recent problems regarding relocation faced by the European Relocation from Malta program.
Immigration Policies and the Ecuadorian Exodus Bertoli, Simone; Moraga, Jesús Fernández-Huertas; Ortega, Francesc
The World Bank economic review,
01/2011, Letnik:
25, Številka:
1
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Ecuador recently experienced an unprecedented wave of emigration following the severe economic crisis of the late 1990s. Individual-level data for Ecuador and its two main migration destinations, ...Spain and the United States, are used to examine the size and skill composition of these migration flows and the role of wage differences in accounting for these features. Estimations of earnings regressions for Ecuadorians in all three countries show substantially larger income gains following migration to the United States than to Spain, with the wage differential increasing with migrants' education level. While this finding can account for the pattern of positive sorting in education toward the United States, it fails to explain why most Ecuadorians opted for Spain. The explanation for this preference appears to lie in Spain's visa waiver program for Ecuadorians. When the program was abruptly terminated, monthly inflows of Ecuadorians to Spain declined immediately.
The size of the cliff at the border Bertoli, Simone; Fernández-Huertas Moraga, Jesús
Regional science and urban economics,
03/2015, Letnik:
51
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The scale of international migration flows depends on moving costs that are, in turn, influenced by host-country policies. This paper shows how to estimate the influence of policies upon bilateral ...migration flows to multiple destinations. We rely on a Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator to derive estimates that are consistent under more general distributional assumptions on the underlying RUM model than the ones commonly adopted in the literature. We derive bounds for the estimated direct and indirect effects of migration policies that reflect the uncertainty connected to the use of aggregate data, and we show that bilateral migration flows can be highly sensitive to the immigration policies set by other destination countries, an externality that we are able to quantify.
•We measure the size of the policy-induced cliff at the border.•The challenge lies in controlling for the correlation in policies across destinations.•We estimate the effect of policies on bilateral migration flows through PPML.•The use of aggregate data generates uncertainty over estimated elasticities.•We provide bounds for the elasticities, in particular bounding policy externalities.
The productive characteristics of migrating individuals, emigrant selection, affect welfare. The empirical estimation of the degree of selection suffers from a lack of complete and nationally ...representative data. This paper uses a dataset that addresses both issues: the ENET (Mexican Labor Survey), which identifies emigrants right before they leave and allows a direct comparison to non-migrants. This dataset presents a relevant dichotomy: it shows negative selection for urban Mexican emigrants to the United States for the period 2000–2004 together with positive selection in Mexican emigration out of rural Mexico to the United States in the same period. Three theories that could explain this dichotomy are tested. Whereas higher skill prices in Mexico than in the US are enough to explain half of the negative selection result in urban Mexico, its combination with network effects and wealth constraints fully accounts for positive selection in rural Mexico.
Strong political movements voicing opposition to immigration are on the upswing. Does such potential antagonism translate into residential dynamics? We study whether natives fled from immigrant areas ...in reaction to the largest and fastest migration shock in the OECD. The inflow–causing the population of Spain to grow by 10% between 1998 and 2008–represented a largely new phenomenon, the size of which had not been factored into previous expectations, thereby providing quasi-experimental sources of variance. Our results show that immigrant inflows caused mild native displacement from denser, established neighborhoods, but also more real estate development in these areas. In parallel, both natives and immigrants were collocating in booming suburban communities, resulting in no changes to overall measures of ethnic segregation. In light of the results, we argue that whenever ethnic-minority arrivals spur the creation of new neighborhoods, conventional empirical methods overstate the degree of native flight.
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