published in: International Journal of Manpower, 2015, 36(4), 441 - 468
Using data on migration flows for a sample of 15 OECD countries over the period 1980-2006, we analyse the effect of unemployment and labour institutions such as employment protection legislation, coverage of unemployment benefits, minimum wages, union power and tax wedge on migration flows. We allow for interactions of these institutions with migration entry laws, as both affect equilibrium wages and employment in destination countries, influencing mobility decisions of immigrants. We find strong and negative effects of unemployment, employment protection and migration policy on flows. The negative effect of migration policy on flows is larger in countries with high than in countries with low employment protection. We find positive effects for minimum wages, unemployment benefits and union power. We deal with potential endogeneity of the variables of interest and report heterogeneous effects depending on the group of countries of origin and destination.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.