Immigration, family responsibilities and the labor supply of skilled native women

This paper investigates the effects of Spain's large recentimmigration wave on the labor supply of highly skilled native women. Wehypothesize that female immigration led to an increase in the supply ofaffordable household services, such as housekeeping and child or elderlycare. As a result, i) native females with high earnings potential were ableto increase their labor supply, and ii) the effects were larger on skilledwomen whose labor supply was heavily constrained by familyresponsibilities. Our evidence indicates that over the last decadeimmigration led to an important expansion in the size of the householdservices sector and to an increase in the labor supply of women in highearningoccupations (of about 2 hours per week). We also find thatimmigration allowed skilled native women to return to work sooner afterchildbirth, to stay in the workforce longer when having elderlydependents in the household, and to postpone retirement.Methodologically, we show that the availability of even limited Registrydata makes it feasible to conduct the analysis using quarterly householdsurvey data, as opposed to having to rely on the decennial Census.Immigration, labor supply, fertility, retirement, household services

Information and discrimination in the rental housing market: evidence from a field experiment

This paper investigates the effect of disclosing information on the discriminatory behaviour against immigrants in the Spanish rental market. We conduct a field experiment where emails are sent showing interest on vacant rental apartments. Fictitious applicants whose names represent different ethnic groups send emails with different amount of information about their ability to pay the rent. Our results show that applicants with a Moroccan sounding name are 15 percentage points less likely to be contacted by the property owner than those with a Spanish name. We also find that revealing positive information about the socioeconomic status of the Moroccan candidate increases the probability of being contacted by 8 percentage points. However, the information revealed does not completely eliminate discriminatory behavior, suggesting the presence of negative attitudes towards immigrants.Discrimination, migration, rental market, field experiment

Rental housing discrimination and the persistence of ethnic enclaves

We conduct a field experiment to show that discrimination in the rental market represents a significant obstacle for the geographical assimilation process by immigrants. We employ the Internet platform to identify vacant rental apartments in different areas of the two largest Spanish cities, Madrid and Barcelona. We send emails showing interest in the apartments and signal the applicants’ ethnicity by using native and foreign-sounding names. We find that, in line with previous studies, immigrants face a differential treatment when trying to rent an apartment. Our results also indicate that this negative treatment varies considerably with the concentration of immigrants in the area. In neighbourhoods with a low presence of immigrants the response rate is 30 percentage points lower for immigrants than for natives, while this differential disappears when the immigration share reaches 50%. We conclude that discriminatory practices in the rental housing market contribute to perpetuate the ethnic spatial segregation observed in large cities.immigration, discrimination, spatial segregation.

New Evidence on the Healthy Immigrant Effect

This paper presents new evidence that immigrants have better health than natives upon arrival to their destination. It analyzes a very interesting episode in international migration, namely the exodus of Ecuadorians in the aftermath of the economic collapse in the late 1990s. More than 600,000 Ecuadorians from 1999 to 2005 left their homeland, most relocating in Spain. Using information from the birth certificate data, the paper compares the birth outcomes of immigrant women in Spain not only to that of natives at destination, but to that of natives in Ecuador and immigrants from other nationalities in Spain. These comparisons suggest that the better health at birth of children born to immigrants from Ecuador partly responds to the selection of healthier women into migration

Does paternity leave reduce fertility?

We find that the introduction of two weeks of paid paternity leave in Spain in 2007 led to delays in subsequent fertility. Following a regression discontinuity design and using rich administrative data, we show that parents who were (just) entitled to the new paternity leave took longer to have another child compared to (just) ineligible parents. We also show that older eligible couples were less likely to have an additional child within the following six years after the introduction of the reform. We provide evidence in support of two potentially complementary channels behind the negative effects on subsequent fertility. First, fathers' increasing involvement in childcare led to higher labor force attachment among mothers. This may have raised the opportunity cost of an additional child. We also find that men reported lower desired fertility after the reform, possibly due to their increased awareness of the costs of childrearing, or to a shift in preferences from child quantity to quality

Immigration and the Informal Labor Market

This paper investigates the relationship between immigration and the size of the informal or underground economy. Exploiting the variation across Spanish provinces we find that the massive immigration wave between 2000 and 2009 is highly correlated to the share of unregistered employment,a proxy for the size of the underground or informal labor market. We estimate that a 10 percentage points increase in the share of immigrants in a province generates between a 3 and 8 percentage pointsincrease in unregistered employment. We also find that the controversial regularization of illegal aliensconducted in 2005 substantially reduced the number of illegal workers but did not affect the relationshipbetween immigration and informality. In contrast, we do find that this relationship becomes stronger during the economic recession inaugurated in 2008

Feeling useless: the effect of unemployment on mental health in the Great Recession

This article documents a strong connection between unemployment and mental distress using data from the Spanish National Health Survey. We exploit the collapse of the construction sector to identify the causal effect of job losses in different segments of the Spanish labor market. Our results suggest that an increase of the unemployment rate by 10 percentage points due to the breakdown in construction raised reported poor health and mental disorders in the affected population by 3 percentage points, respectively. We argue that the size of this effect responds to the fact that the construction sector was at the center of the economic recession. As a result, workers exposed to the negative labor demand shock faced very low chances of re-entering employment. We show that this led to long unemployment spells, stress, hopelessness, and feelings of uselessness. These effects point towards a potential channel for unemployment hysteresis

Immigration, assimilation, and the future of public education

This paper analyzes the effects of immigration on the size and quality of public education using a quantitative political economy model that allows for a heterogeneous immigrant population. Our analysis distinguishes between short and long-run effects and accounts for the consequences of naturalization and assimilation. We use the model to analyze Spain's large 2000-2008 immigration wave. We find that immigration led to a 15% increase in public enrollment in the short run, together with a 3% reduction in public education spending and almost a 1 percentage-point increase in the share of native households using private schools. Depending on the eventual degree of assimilation, these trends will be greatly intensified or mitigated once immigrants naturalize and gain the right to vote. Our analysis suggests that assimilation in terms of family size and the value assigned to children's education are the most relevant dimensions quantitatively. We also show that immigration policies that favor one group over another can significantly alter the overall effects of immigration on the schooling system

Immigration and the public-private school choice

This paper empirically analyzes the effects of immigration on the schooling decisions of natives. We employ household-level data for Spain for years 2000-2015, a period characterized by high economic growth and large immigration that was halted by a long and severe recession. Our estimates reveal that increases in immigrant density at the school level triggered an important native flight from tuition-free, public schools toward private ones. We also find strong evidence of cream-skimming as more educated native households are the most likely to switch to private schools in response to immigration. Furthermore, we find that immigration leads to higher student-teacher ratios in public schools. We conclude that our results are consistent with the predictions of a political-economy model of school choice