Social identity and labor market outcomes of immigrants

This paper explores the relationship between social identity and labor market outcomes of immigrants. Using survey data from Italy, we provide robust evidence that integrated immigrants, who state they have strong feelings of belonging to the societies of both the host and home country, have higher employment rates than do assimilated immigrants, who identify exclusively with the host country culture. Unlike previous literature, our findings indicate that assimilation does not necessarily provide a clear labor market advantage over immigrants who identify only with their original ethnic group. The positive labor market effect of integration is especially large for women, low-skilled, and immigrants with a brief experience in Italy and arriving in Italy at older ages, who generally face stronger barriers to entry into the labor market. The main mechanism driving the positive effect of multiple social identities points to belonging to local networks that ensure in-group favoritism and sharing of information

Effect of Media News on Radicalization of Attitudes to Immigration

Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Recent years have witnessed a growing aversion to immigration worldwide and, at the same time, radicalization of public opinion on the issue. This paper explores the relationship between media news and individual attitudes to immigration. We run an empirical analysis whereby an index capturing individuals’ pro-immigration attitude, measured in 19 countries, is regressed over indexes capturing the coverage and tone of media news about immigration. We find that pro-immigration attitudes are negatively correlated with media coverage and the negative tone of news. However, this correlation is significant only for those with high trust in the media. In the case of low trust, higher coverage of immigration and a negative news slant make previous preferences and beliefs vis-à-vis immigration more extreme, yielding a lower pro-immigration index for those politically on the right, while the opposite applies to those on the left. The pro-immigration index is constructed by means of fuzzy methods to account for the many aspects defining attitudes to immigration

Employed unemployed? On shadow employment in transition

Undeclared employment, Propensity score matching, Transition, O17, J22, P37,

Metabolomics for crop improvement against salinity stress

In the post-genomic era, increasing efforts have been done to describe the relationship between genome and phenotype in plants. It has become clear that even a complete understanding of the state of the genes, messages, and proteins in a living system does not reveal its phenotype. Metabolites are the main readouts of gene vs environment interactions and represent the sum of all the levels of regula- tion in between gene and enzyme. Therefore, metabolome can be considered as the final recipient of biological information flow. Some metabolites have a very short lifetime and are indicators of specific metabolic reaction and of plant status. Indeed, it is well known that many of them are transformed during specific stresses and involved in plant stress response and resistance. Salinity provides an important example of the effectiveness of metabolic changes in response to stress. In fact, exposure to salinity triggers specific strategies for cell osmotic adjustment and control of ion and water homeostasis to minimize stress damage and to reestablish growth. A ubiquitous mechanism that plants have evolved to adapt to salinity involves sodium sequestration in the vacuole, as a cheap osmoticum, and synthesis and accumulation of compatible compounds, both for osmotic adjustment and oxidative stress protection in the cytosol. Metabolomics has been utilized for the study of plants in response to salinity stress in order to dissect particular patterns associated with stress tolerance. These studies have proven that certain metabolites are present in case of salt-induced met- abolic dysfunction and can act as effectors of osmotic readjustment or antioxidant response. Thus, the presence of particular metabolite patterns can be associated with stress tolerance and could serve as accurate markers for salt-tolerant crop selection in breeding programs