A firm level perspective on migration

Giulia Bettin, Alessia Lo Turco and Daniela Maggioni

No 360, Working Papers from Universita' Politecnica delle Marche (I), Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali

Abstract: We address the role of migrant workers from extra-EU countries in Italian manufacturing production at the firm-level. Cross price and demand elasticities confirm the complementarity found in previous studies between migrants and natives, which holds when native workers are split into white and blue collars. However, when measuring how the ratio of domestic to migrant (migrant to domestic) workers changes in response to a change in the migrant (domestic) wage - Morishima Elasticity of Substitution - we find that the two labour inputs are substitutes. We further analyse the effect of the use of foreign labour in manufacturing firms on the industry composition. We find that, ceteris paribus, had migrant labour not grown in our sample period, the weight of Low Skill intensive sectors would have been approximately 2% lower and the white to blue collars ratio would have been slightly higher than observed, even accounting for the complementarity between natives and migrants.

Keywords: Migrant workers; elasticity of substitution; manufacturing production technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 F22 J61 L60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37
Date: 2011-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Related works:
Working Paper: A Firm-Level Perspective on Migration (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anc:wpaper:360

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