Calendrier du 28 février 2019
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Du 28/02/2019 de 12:30 à 13:30
ÖZGÜZEL Cem (CES & IZA)
Emigration and Local Labor Markets: Evidence from the Great Recession in Spain
Despite the extensive literature on the effects of immigration, little is known about the impact of emigration. Between 2009-2016, Spain saw a net outflow of more than 600 000 working-age foreign-born due to the severe economic crisis. Focusing on this episode, using micro-data from municipal registers and longitudinal Spanish administrative data, I study the effects of emigration of the foreign-born population on the wages and employment of the staying natives. I build a shift-share instrument based on the past settlements of the foreign-born population across Spain to argue for a causal relationship. In line with my labor market equilibrium model, I find that emigration led to an increase in the employment and wages of the low- and medium-skilled native workers, who have the highest substitutability with departing foreign-born population. Workers at the high end of the skill distribution experienced small wage increases but no significant effects on employment improvement. I further show that the emigration of the foreign-born increased the entries of the inactive low-skilled natives into the labor market, while also slowing outflows into other areas or unemployment of all skill groups.