Networks and selection in international migration to Spain

Nina Neubecker, Marcel Smolka and Anne Steinbacher

No 35, University of Tübingen Working Papers in Business and Economics from University of Tuebingen, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, School of Business and Economics

Abstract: This paper analyzes the role of ethnic communities in shaping the recent immigration boom to Spain. We find that ethnic communities exerted a strong positive effect on the scale and a strong negative effect on the skill structure of this immigration. Unlike previous studies, we explicitly acknowledge similarities among final migration destinations and thus partly relax the independence of irrelevant alternatives assumption. We strengthen our causal interpretation by controlling for observed and unobserved heterogeneity in bilateral migration costs, and by adopting an instrumental variables approach. Our results suggest that previous estimates of the scale effect are upward-biased by approximately 50%.

Keywords: International migration; Ethnic networks; Family and friends effect; Skill structure of migration; Spain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/58249/1/716583534.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: NETWORKS AND SELECTION IN INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION TO SPAIN (2017)
Working Paper: Networks and Selection in International Migration to Spain (2015)
Working Paper: Networks and Selection in International Migration to Spain (2013)
Working Paper: Networks and Selection in International Migration to Spain (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:tuewef:35

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Tübingen Working Papers in Business and Economics from University of Tuebingen, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, School of Business and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().