the fiscal impact of immigration in france a generational accounting approach the objective of this study is to use both static and dynamic frameworks to compare the benefits that immigrants draw from the public system with their contributions through the taxes that they pay the main conclusion of this paper is that the impact of immigration on welfare systems is weak thus if we compare on a given date immigrants global contribution to the public administration budget with the volume of transfers they receive immigrants appear to be relatively favoured by the redistribution system at the same time even if immigrants seem to pay less taxes and receive more transfers than natives the difference in distribution between the two populations with a higher concentration of immigrants in the active age groups and a sparser concentration among the net beneficiaries of the social transfer system leads to a slightly positive long term impact of immigration on public finances however the impact of immigration remains very slight compared with the global effort that would have to be undertaken to reduce budgetary imbalances

unskilled migration a burden or a boon for the welfare state as relatively low earners migrants are net beneficiaries of the welfare state therefore in a static setup migration may be resisted by the entire native born population however it is shown that in a dynamic setup with a pension system which is an important pillar of any welfare state migration is beneficial to all income high and low and all age old and young groups when the economy has good access to international capital markets the pro migration feature of the dynamic model is weakened and possibly overturned when the economy does not have good access to such markets in this case to the extent that factor prices are significantly affected by migration because of low substitution between labour and capital low skill native born and possibly also high skill native born may lose

the effect of immigration along the distribution of wages this paper analyses the effect immigration has on wages of native workers unlike most previous work we estimate wage effects along the distribution of wages we derive a flexible empirical strategy that does not rely on pre allocating immigrants to particular skill groups in our empirical analysis we demonstrate that immigrants downgrade considerably upon arrival as for the effects on native wages we find that immigration depresses wages below the 20th percentile of the wage distribution but leads to slight wage increases in the upper part of the wage distribution the overall wage effect of immigration is slightly positive the positive wage effects we find are although modest too large to be explained by an immigration surplus we suggest alternative explanations based on the idea that immigrants are paid less than the value of what they contribute to production generating therefore a surplus and we assess the magnitude of these effects

equilibrium in auctions with entry the authors model entry incentives in auctions with risk neutral bidders and characterize a symmetric equilibrium in which the number of entrants is stochastic the presence of too many potential bidders raises coordination costs that detract from welfare the authors show that the seller and society can benefit from policies that reduce market thickness i e the relative abundance of buyers their analysis extends well known revenue equivalence and ranking theorems but also demonstrates that variations in the auction environment affect optimal policies e g reservation prices in ways not anticipated by models that ignore entry copyright 1994 by american economic association

time consistent immigration policy under economic and cultural externalities summarydiscussions of immigration policy are typically framed in the context of their economic effects in receiving countries notably labour market and fiscal effects in this paper we characterize immigration policy in a richer model where migrants are also a source of cultural externalities stemming from either preferences or the functioning of formal and informal institutions in receiving countries while in terms of pure economic effects immigrants do not generally have any more incentives than low skilled natives to allow for more immigration in the future this is not the case when accounting for cultural externalities therefore insofar as past immigrants have a voice in affecting future policies a time consistent immigration policy entails back loading as natives attempt at limiting voice of immigrants in the future the economic effects of immigration flows as well as the cultural externality they introduce furthermore natives exploit any pre commitment device to limit immigration flows e g building walls limiting immigrants political rights or accumulating fiscal surpluses

assimilation to a welfare state labor market performance and use of social benefits by immigrants to finland this paper documents the economic performance of immigrants in a country characterized by an extensive welfare state and a short immigration history upon arrival immigrants to finland have substantially lower employment rates than comparable natives while they experience rapid employment growth only men from oecd countries catch up with natives despite the persisting employment and earnings differences between non oecd immigrants and natives the differences in income transfers disappear in roughly 20 years the immigrant native employment gaps are larger in finland than in australia canada or the us

immigration social security and broader fiscal impacts population aging and rising health costs will cause dramatic increases in federal expenditures some decades from now lee et al 1999 rising immigration to the united states may help avert this future crisis by slowing population aging and helping to pay for social security and public health care but many immigrants have low education and high fertility so their net fiscal impact may be costly rather than beneficial this paper revisits our earlier analysis of the fiscal impact of immigration lee and miller 1997 henceforth lm97 in light of higher projected rates of productivity growth an unexpected increase in the effective federal income tax rate in recent years and some revisions of the demographic projections we will emphasize implications for social security and address points raised by the recent literature holger bonin et al 1998 george borjas 1999 alan auerbach and philip oreopolis 2000 kjetil storesletten 2000

immigrant participation in the welfare system this paper presents a systematic analysis of immigrant participation in the us welfare system using the 1970 and 1980 us censuses in contrast to the previous studies the researchers focused on changes in welfare use across immigrant cohorts over time for a single immigrant cohort as it assimilates to the us furthermore it develops a theoretical model of the migration decision that explicitly incorporates the income insurance aspect of the us welfare system the analysis revealed that recent immigrant cohorts use the welfare system more intensively than earlier immigrant waves also the immigrant welfare participation was greater the longer an immigrant household had resided in the us and those characteristics of the immigrants country of origin were important determinants of welfare participation in addition the theoretical model of the migration decision which explicitly incorporated the presence of a welfare system in the destination country and this model could account for some of the ways in which source country characteristics were found to affect immigrant welfare participation

welfare payments and other economic determinants of female migration this article investigates the effects of welfare payments wages and unemployment on women s probability of interstate migration in the united states it also investigates if the income attraction of locations varies with recency of labor market experience welfare gains increase the probability of interstate migration welfare effects are largest for single mothers with small children and stronger among women with no recent labor market experience the welfare effects albeit small are larger than the wage effects the wage effects are weaker among women with no recent work experience ethnic specific analyses suggest differences in migration behavior among anglos african americans and puerto ricans

social security and migration with endogenous skill upgrading abstract the aim of the paper is to investigate the joint redistributive effects of migration and pensions and to reassess the sustainability issue raised in the existing economic literature the paper first develops a theoretical framework to analyse the impact of international migration on the labour market the model allows for heterogeneity across native born individuals and for migrants to affect both the wages and the education decision in the recipient country it then explicitly focuses on pensions under alternative migration scenarios the analysis shows that migration causes redistributive effects which increase across group wage inequality however the endogenous educational response by residents partially offsets the redistributive impact of migration while creating additional interest groups migration helps the financial sustainability of the pension scheme but the interaction between migration and pensions causes complex inter and intragenerational redistributive conflicts which are analysed in the paper

public pensions and immigration policy in a democracy the paper analyzes the link between the public pension system and the immigration policy in a pay as you go system the incentives for immigration vary significantly between individuals at different lifetime periods in the framework of an overlapping generations model we show that the median voter s choice in general leads to inefficient levels of immigration the median voter neglects the effects of the externalities within the pension system on other generations an immigration policy that is not affected by the median voter s choice but instead is constitutionally determined will avoid welfare losses the expected lifetime income of each generation can be increased by applying a rule of steady immigration

migration and income redistribution responsibilities this study examines whether afdc benefits determine or discourage state to state migration flows in the united states a pooled cross section time series model is developed to estimate afdc benefits in a state and recipients and whether benefits in one state affect benefits in other states a second model using data from the 1980 census and the panel study of income dynamics estimates migration of afdc recipients and the level of benefits in in migration and out migration states both models indicate that small but statistically significant amounts of migration occur which may be quite important but only in the long run movers although small in number are much more likely to move to a state with higher benefits states perceive this migration as important indicating that states should have less control and the federal government more control over income redistribution

the effect of welfare and wage levels on the location decisions of female headed households abstract this paper develops and estimates a model designed to calculate the impact of welfare benefit levels wages and tax rates on the location choices of female headed households the empirical model assumes that women simultaneously choose both where they will live and whether or not they will participate in the welfare system based on their expected income and expected hours of work for each location participation possibility these income and hours expectations depend in turn on the welfare benefits wage and tax rates facing each household in each location it is found that both regional welfare levels and wage rates have a significant effect on the location decisions of this population the probability of a typical female headed household with little outside income leaving an area with low welfare payments and low wages can be as much as 12 points higher over a 4 year period than the probability of leaving a high welfare high wage area

public pensions and return migration in a median voter framework with pensions and immigration we show that only few unskilled immigrants are allowed into the country because the unskilled native median voter is concerned with negative effects on his or her wage but not with the positive effects to other groups in society when return migration is allowed for the median voter is more willing to accept immigration because he or she can shift some of the burden to future generations

the impact of immigration on the british labour market using data from the british labour force survey this article provides an empirical investigation of the way immigration affects labour market outcomes of native born workers in britain set beside a theoretical discussion of the underlying economic mechanisms we discuss problems arising in empirical estimation and how to address them we show that the overall skill distribution of immigrants is remarkably similar to that of the native born workforce we find no strong evidence that immigration has overall effects on aggregate employment participation unemployment and wages but some differences according to education

can guest workers solve japan s fiscal problems the labor force in japan is projected to fall from 64 million in 2014 to 20 million in 2100 signaling unprecedented tax transfer adjustments to achieve fiscal sustainability in this paper we develop a quantitative overlapping generations model to measure the impact of guest worker programs in japan against a baseline general equilibrium transition in which the consumption tax adjusts to achieve fiscal sustainability we compute alternative transitions with guest worker programs depending on the size and skill distribution of guest workers these programs may mitigate japan s fiscal imbalance problem with a relatively manageable increase in the consumption tax jel e2 e6 h5 j11 j15

an introduction to the economics of immigration in oecd countries the share of the foreign born in oecd countries is increasing and this article summarizes economics research on the effects of immigration in those nations four broad topics are addressed labor market issues fiscal questions the political economy of immigration and productivity international trade extreme concerns about deleterious labour market and fiscal impacts following from new immigrants are not found to be warranted however it is also clear that government policies and practices regarding the selection and integration of new migrants affect labour market fiscal and social cultural outcomes policies that are well informed well crafted and well executed beneficially improve population welfare

immigrant assimilation and welfare participation do immigrants assimilate into or out of welfare this paper analyzes differences in welfare utilization between immigrants and natives in sweden using a large panel data set for the years 1990 to 1996 we find that immigrants use welfare to a greater extent than natives and that differences cannot be explained by observable characteristics welfare participation decreases with time spent in sweden refugees assimilate out of welfare at a faster rate than nonrefugee immigrants but neither group is predicted to reach parity with natives increases in unemployment and immigration as well as the change in the composition of immigrants contributed to the increase in welfare utilization in sweden

the impact of immigration on the structure of wages theory and evidence from britain immigration to the uk particularly among more educated workers has risen appreciably over the past 30 years and as such has raised labor supply however studies of the impact of immigration have failed to find any significant effect on the wages of native born workers in the uk this is potentially puzzling since there is evidence that changes in the supply of educated natives have had significant effects on their wages using a pooled time series of british cross sectional micro data on male wages and employment from the mid 1970s to the mid 2000s this paper offers one possible resolution to this puzzle namely that in the uk natives and foreign born workers are imperfect substitutes we show that immigration has primarily reduced the wages of immigrants and in particular of university educated immigrants with little discernable effect on the wages of the native born

selection and network effects migration flows into oecd countries 1990 2000 abstract this paper presents empirical evidence on immigration flows into the oecd countries during the period 1990 2000 our results indicate that network effects are strong but vary between different groups of welfare states and between countries according to the type of immigration policy being applied network effects seem to be less important in the nordic countries which also seem to attract immigrants from the lowest income level source countries we do not find clear evidence that selection effects measured by migration flows being sensitive to differences in public social expenditures have had a major influence on the observed migration patterns until now this may partly be explained by restrictive migration policies which may have dampened the potential selection effects

importing the poor welfare magnetism and cross border welfare migration i test for welfare induced migration by comparing afdc participation in border counties to interior counties in the same state if migration costs are lower for border county residents border counties on the high benefit side of a state border should have higher welfare participation relative to the state s interior counties border counties on the low benefit side should have lower welfare participation relative to the state s interior counties the results obtained using county level data from 1970 90 indicate that having a neighbor with benefits that are 100 lower increases afdc expenditures in border counties by 4 0 6 8 percent relative to interior counties

immigration and the welfare state immigrant participation in means tested entitlement programs this paper documents the extent to which immigrants in the united states over the past 30 years participate in the many programs that make up the welfare state the immigrant native difference in the probability of receiving cash benefits is small but the gap widens once other programs are included in the analysis 21 percent of immigrant households receive some type of assistance as compared with only 14 percent of native households the types of benefits received by earlier immigrants influence the types of benefits received by newly arrived immigrants hence there might be ethnic networks that transmit information about the availability of particular benefits to new immigrants excerpt

non native speakers of english in the classroom what are the effects on pupil performance there has been an increase in the number of children going to school in england who do not speak english as a first language we investigate whether this has an impact on the educational outcomes of native english speakers at the end of primary school we show that the negative correlation observed in the raw data is mainly an artefact of selection non native speakers are more likely to attend school with disadvantaged native speakers we attempt to identify a causal impact of changes in the percentage of non native speakers our results suggest zero effect and rule out negative effects

intra national risk sharing and government sizes evidence from nonlinear regression this article investigates the effects of government sizes on the cyclical elasticity coefficient theory of intra national risk sharing evaluates the effects of the cyclical sensitivity of taxes to income fluctuation across us states because government size is a proxy for automatic stabilizer which captures the relevant differences of fiscal variables at the state level hence the cyclical sensitivity may differ across various magnitudes of local government we employ two nonlinear econometric methods threshold regression of panel data hansen 1999 and semi parametric smooth coefficient regression of cross sectional data koop and tobias 2006 evidence from a panel of 50 us states supports a positive relationship between government size and intra national risk sharing

voting on low skill immigration under different pension regimes depending on the design of the domestic pension system and thetype of immigrants voters will decide differently onimmigration policy in this paper we investigate the votingoutcome of three groups of heterogeneous voters skilledworkers unskilled workers and retirees under beveridgian orbismarckian pension systems which are either of the fixedcontribution rate or the fixed replacement ratio type we findthat while the use of a beveridge or bismarck system does notchange the results qualitatively the fixed contribution ratevs fixed replacement ratio distinction leads to substantialchanges in the optimal choices of different groups

the fiscal effects of immigration to the uk we investigate the fiscal impact of immigration on the uk economy with a focus on the period since 1995 our findings indicate that when considering the resident immigrant population in each year from 1995 to 2011 immigrants from the european economic area eea have made a positive fiscal contribution even during periods when the uk was running budget deficits while non eea immigrants not dissimilar to natives have made a negative contribution for immigrants that arrived since 2000 contributions have been positive throughout and particularly so for immigrants from eea countries notable is the strong positive contribution made by immigrants from countries that joined the eu in 2004

sustaining fiscal policy through immigration this paper explores the fiscal implications of immigration to the us and argues that immigration policy should be viewed as a vital part of fiscal policy in particular a case is made that skill

the economic effects of immigration a dynamic analysis abstract this paper examines the economic effects of immigration using a neo classical growth model with overlapping dynasties we demonstrate that in contrast to the predictions of the static models often used in the analysis of immigration in a dynamic model with endogenous capital accumulation shifts in factor prices that result from changes in immigration policy will be very modest consequently benefits to natives from immigration are much smaller than previous studies have found and smaller still if labor supply is elastic on the other hand the adverse effects on wages are much smaller as well implying that in a model with only two inputs immigration plays a much smaller role in redistribution from labor to capital than previously thought

on the political economy of immigration and income redistribution in this article we analyze an economy in which agents vote over immigration policy and redistributive tax policy we show that natives preferences over immigration are influenced by the prospect that immigrants will be voting over future tax policy we also show that changes in the degree of international capital mobility the distribution of initial capital among natives the wealth or poverty of the immigrant pool and the future voting rights and entitlements of immigrants can have dramatic effects on equilibrium immigration and tax policies finally we provide some empirical support for the model s predictions

the fiscal impact of immigration on the advanced economies this paper is concerned with the advanced economies it begins with a discussion of the demo graphic issues that have played such a large role in the debate on immigration this is followed by a section on the main problems involved in estimating the fiscal impact of immigration and then a summary of the international evidence on this topic mostly from europe and america separate sections on the uk and on low fertility countries follow the main conclusions are as follows highly skilled migrants normally make a large fiscal contribution whereas unskilled migrants are likely to impose a net cost on native taxpayers if they settle in the receiving country however even unskilled migrants may be net contributors if they eventually depart and make few claims on government expenditure while in the country most empirical studies find that the fiscal contribution of the immigrant population as a whole is quite small the positive contribution of some migrants is largely or wholly offset by the negative contribution of others this finding holds across a variety of countries and methodologies estimates of the net fiscal contribution of immigration normally lie within the range 1 per cent of gdp there are a few exceptions but these refer to countries experiencing demographic collapse and they are based on unrealistic assumptions about the inter generational allocation of future taxes and government expenditure with more realistic assumptions the overall fiscal benefit of immigration is quite small even in these countries these findings suggest that in general there is no strong fiscal case for or against sustained large scale immigration the desirability or otherwise of large scale immigration should be decided on other grounds

incumbency and entry in license auctions the anglo dutch auction meets another simple alternative the existence of ex ante strong incumbents may constitute a barrier to entry in auctions for goods such as licenses favoring the allocation to entrants is a way to induce entry and thus create competition designs such as the anglo dutch auction have been proposed with this goal in mind we first show that the anglo dutch auction does indeed foster entry and increases the revenues of the seller however we argue that a more effective way could be to stage the allocation of the good so that each stage reveals information about the participants we show that a sequence of english auctions with high reserve prices in early rounds fulfils this property and is more efficient than any one stage entry auction moreover it also outperforms the anglo dutch auction in terms of seller s revenues

the economics of temporary migrations many migrations are temporary a fact that has often been ignored in the economic literature on migration such omission may be serious in that expected migration temporariness can impart a distinct dynamic element to immigrants economic behavior generating possible consequences for nonmigrants in both home and host countries in this paper we provide a thorough examination of the various aspects of temporary migrations that matter for the analysis of economic phenomena we demonstrate the extent of temporary migrations in population movements we show how temporariness can affect the various economic choices and how better data have improved both the measurement of nonpermanent migrations and the analyses of various aspects of migrant behavior we propose a general theoretical framework for modeling temporary migration decisions based on which we outline the various motives for temporariness while simultaneously reviewing related literature and available data sources we discuss the possible consequences of migration temporariness for nonmigrants in both home and host countries jel f22 f24 j11 j61 k37 o15

self selection and the earnings of immigrants this paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate the empirical study shows that differences in the u s earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills but from different home countries are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration excerpt

the effect of immigrant peers in vocational schools abstract this paper provides new evidence on how the presence of immigrant peers in the classroom affects native student achievement the analysis is based on longitudinal administrative data on two cohorts of vocational training students in italy s largest region vocational training institutions provide the ideal setting for studying these effects because they attract not only disproportionately high shares of immigrants but also the lowest ability native students we adopt a value added model and exploit within school variation both within and across cohorts for identification our results show small negative average effects on maths test scores that are larger for low ability native students strongly non linear and only observable in classes with a high top 20 immigrant concentration these outcomes are driven by classes with a high average linguistic distance between immigrants and natives with no apparent additional role played by ethnic diversity

tax burden and migration a political economy theory and evidence abstract the extent of taxation and redistribution policy is generally determined as a political economy equilibrium by a balance between those who gain from higher taxes transfers and those who lose the standard theory of the size of government in a representative democracy links the tax burden to measures of the pre tax income inequality we develop in this paper a theory which encompasses the existing literature and provides a complementary channel linking the tax burden in the presence of migration to the fiscal leakage from native born to the migrants in a stylized model of migration and human capital formation we show somewhat against the conventional wisdom that low skill immigration can lead to a lower tax burden and less redistribution than would be the case with no immigration even though migrants naturally join the pro tax transfer coalition data on 11 european countries over the period 1974 1992 are consistent with the implications of the theory a higher share of low education immigrants in the population leads to a lower tax rate on labor income and less generous social transfers

when minority labor migrants meet the welfare state life cycle employment of minority labor migrants who entered norway in the early 1970s diverges from that of natives immigrant employment was nearly complete during early years but declined to 50 by the year 2000 compared to 87 for a native comparison group we find that immigrant employment is particularly sensitive to the business cycle and that economic downturns of the 1980s and 1990s accelerated their labor market exit we trace part of the decline to migrants being overrepresented in shrinking industries but we also identify welfare disincentives that contribute to poor life cycle employment performance of immigrants with many dependent family members

public pensions and voting on immigration in a recent paper scholten and thum 1996 analyze the impact of a pay as you go payg pension system with a fixed replacement ratio on the immigration policy in a democracy we extend the analysis of median voter s choice in two respects first in contrast to scholten and thum 1996 who assume myopic voting behavior our paper considers fully rational agents and provides a solution under this more complex behavioral assumption voting with rational agents yields a more liberal immigration policy than with myopic voters second we examine a different decision structure with a fixed contribution rate to the pension system in this case the majority rule leads to a completely different solution

immigrants labour market performance and social insurance using longitudinal data from the date of arrival we study long term labour market and social insurance outcomes for all major immigrant cohorts to norway since 1970 immigrants from high income countries performed as natives while labour migrants from low income source countries had declining employment rates and increasing disability programme participation over the lifecycle refugees and family migrants assimilated during the initial period upon arrival but labour market convergence halted after a decade and was accompanied by rising social insurance rates for the children of labour migrants of the 1970s we uncover evidence of intergenerational assimilation in education earnings and fertility

migration and pension with international capital mobility abstract being relatively low earners migrants are net beneficiaries of the welfare state therefore in a static set up migration may be resisted by the entire native born population however it is shown that in a dynamic set up with a pension system which is an important pillar of any welfare state migration is beneficial to all income high and low and all age old and young groups

the economics of immigration this literature review concerns the impact of immigration on the economy of the host country focusing on the experience of the united states the emphasis is on the period from the 1970s to the 1990s the author shows that research earlier in this period generally concluded that the economic effects of immigration were positive but that more recent research on later migrations have generally concluded that immigration may be having an adverse effect on the earnings of native unskilled workers and be placing an increased burden on welfare programs the importance of such economic analysis for the formulation of appropriate migration policies is stressed

fiscal implications of immigration a net present value calculation focusing on the net fiscal effects the gain from admitting immigrants is computed for a welfare state with large expenditures and a large tax burden sweden prices and behavior are held constant which allows a detailed analysis of the effects of immigration the present value of future tax revenues minus outlays is potentially large usd 23 500 per young working age immigrant but an average new immigrant represents a net government loss of usd 20 500 the dominant factors are employment rates and age for young working age immigrants the break even participation rate for which the gain would be zero is 60 well below the empirical rate for this group

immigration and public finances in oecd countries abstract this paper shows that the macroeconomic and fiscal consequences of international migration are positive for oecd countries and suggests that international migration produces a demographic dividend by increasing the share of the workforce within the population the estimation of a structural vector autoregressive model on a panel of 19 oecd countries over the period 1980 2015 reveals that a migration shock increases gdp per capita through a positive effect on both the ratio of working age to total population and the employment rate international migration also improves the fiscal balance by reducing the per capita transfers paid by the government and per capita old age public spending to rationalize these findings an original theoretical framework is developed this framework highlights the roles of both the demographic structure and intergenerational public transfers and shows that migration is beneficial to host economies characterized by aging populations and large public sectors

analyzing the fiscal impact of u s immigration this paper reconsiders the fiscal impact of immigrants over time in the us by using the technique of generational accounting introduced by auerbach et al generational accounting considers not only the net contribution of immigrants to fiscal balance but also the size of this impact in relation to the overall balance it further compares changes in immigration policy to other policies from the analysis three conclusions were formulated 1 whether immigration contributes to or helps alleviate fiscal stress depends on the future generations if the entire fiscal imbalance currently estimated for the us is placed on future generations then the presence of new immigrants reduces the burden of the natives 2 fiscal gain from immigration is reduced when a policy of fiscal responsibility is followed the gain is dependent on the extent to which government purchases rise with the immigrant population 3 the impact of immigration on fiscal balance is extremely small in relation to the size of the overall imbalance itself thus immigration should not be perceived as a major source of the existing imbalance or as a potential solution to it

immigration to the land of redistribution negative perceptions about migrants in europe are driven by concerns that foreigners abuse welfare paradoxically instruments of social inclusion are becoming weapons of mass exclusion we compare evidence on welfare access and the net fiscal position of migrants with perceptions based on a largely unexploited database eu silc we find no evidence that legal migrants notably skilled migrants are net recipients of transfers from the state however there is evidence of residual dependency on non contributory transfers and self selection of unskilled migrants in the countries with the most generous welfare states alternative strategies to unbundle migration from welfare access are discussed

immigration unemployment and pensions this paper examines the impact of immigration on a host country with welfare state arrangements that support both the unemployed and the elderly it is shown that low skilled immigration increases the unemployment rate furthermore it harms the low skilled native population and benefits the high skilled natives and pensioners nevertheless as under competitive labor markets immigration generates an unambiguous gain for the native population as a whole howe er in contrast to the findings under full employment this gain can be dampened by an expansion of the pension system

the effect of immigration on public finances the impact of immigration on the public finances is an important influence on public opinion this study aims to provide a thorough conceptual survey pointing out the complexities of a full understanding and the relevance of indirect effects and covering both static perspectives and longer run dynamic issues it considers simple accounting approaches which are relatively neglectful of behavioural responses but also tries to bring out the complexities in the nature of the relationship between immigration and the public exchequer that come with more sophisticated modelling of its economic effects

the use of transfer payments by immigrants this paper uses data from the 1976 survey of income and education to compare the receipt of transfers by families headed by male and female immigrants and those headed by native born americans the average level of transfers is found to be considerably higher among families headed by immigrants but this is almost entirely the result of the higher average age of family members among the immigrant group a reflection of the large inflows of immigrants into the u s during the pre 1924 period when age and other factors are held constant immigrant families are found to be considerably less likely to rely on welfare than native families and their receipts from social insurance programs are found to be only slightly higher

immigration wages and compositional amenities economists are often puzzled by the stronger public opposition to immigration than trade since the two policies have symmetric effects on wages unlike trade however immigration changes the composition of the local population imposing potential externalities on natives while previous studies have focused on fiscal spillovers a broader class of externalities arise because people value the compositional amenities associated with the characteristics of their neighbors and co workers in this paper we present a new method for quantifying the relative importance of these amenities in shaping attitudes toward immigration we use data for 21 countries in the 2002 european social survey which included a series of questions on the economic and social impacts of immigration as well as on the desirability of increasing or reducing immigrant inflows we find that individual attitudes toward immigration policy reflect a combination of concerns over conventional economic impacts i e on wages and taxes and compositional amenities with substantially more weight on composition effects most of the difference in attitudes to immigration between more and less educated natives is attributable to heightened concerns over compositional amenities among the less educated

immigrants and welfare programmes exploring the interactions between immigrant characteristics immigrant welfare dependence and welfare policy the primary purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the papers within the economics literature that have examined the questions of immigrant welfare use and the responsiveness of immigrants to the incentives created by welfare systems while our focus is largely on papers looking at the european case we also draw on studies from the united states in particular on issues where the european literature is thin one set of papers asks whether immigrants who are more likely to use welfare are attracted to more generous welfare states the results from these papers are not clear cut another set of papers asks if immigrants use welfare more intensively than natives and if they assimilate out of or into welfare participation in most cases the unadjusted data show higher use of welfare by immigrants although for some countries for example germany this can be explained by differences in immigrants characteristics yet another set of papers finds that the rate of welfare use by existing migrants can influence the welfare use of newly arrived co nationals we illustrate some of these issues by looking at immigrant welfare use in ireland and the uk immigrants in the uk appear to use welfare more intensively than natives but the opposite appears to be the case in ireland

immigration and welfare magnets this article investigates if the location choices made by immigrants when they arrive in the united states are influenced by the interstate dispersion in welfare benefits income maximizing behavior implies that foreign born welfare recipients unlike their native born counterparts may be clustered in the states that offer the highest benefits the empirical analysis indicates that immigrant welfare recipients are indeed more heavily clustered in high benefit states than the immigrants who do not receive welfare or than natives as a result the welfare participation rate of immigrants is much more sensitive to changes in welfare benefits than that of natives

ageing migration and endogenous public pensions abstract this paper analyses migration behaviour of mobile workers in reaction to population ageing we show that the conventional wisdom that a decrease in fertility will lead to a rise in wages and thus to an inflow of immigrants that mitigates the adverse effects of ageing on public pensions may not hold if labour is heterogeneous moreover we demonstrate that if public pensions are endogenous i e if ageing leads the elderly to successfully lobby for higher taxes it may take several generations before a steady state is reached and the initial migration flow may be opposite to the steady state migration