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Birthright citizenship and parental labor market integration
Abstract
The introduction of the birthplace principle in the reform of the German citizenship law of 1999 significantly changed the legal environment for new-born children of long-term immigrants. In this study, I examine whether migrant parents adjust their labor market behavior in reaction to this improvement in their family's status and perspectives. I implement a type of difference-in-discontinuities approach to identify possible changes in employment and working hours after the enactment of the reform. In particular, I compare the differences in labor market outcomes between the parents of migrant children born shortly before and after the enactment date with those of children of mixed couples (migrants and Germans) who were unaffected by the reform. The results suggest that birthright citizenship for the child does not affect the labor market behavior of the fathers, but causes some mothers to stay at home and take care of their children during the first years.
... These effects are entirely a male phenomenon, raising the puzzle of why immigrant boys seem to benefit from the reform, but immigrant girls do not. Two other papers look at how the reform impacts parents, finding that parents become more culturally assimilated (Avitabile et al. 2013) and that labor market participation decreases for immigrant mothers (Sajons 2019). ...
... In addition, related literatures have focused on non-labor market consequences of naturalization. Examples include Hainmueller and Hangartner (2017) who find that naturalization improves social integration of immigrants or Avitabile and Clots-Figueras (2013) and Sajons (2019) who find that birthright citizenship for immigrant children improves their parents' social and labor market integration. ...
The decision of the UK to leave the European Union created uncertainty for European citizens resident in the UK for the period 2016–2019. This paper studies the effects of this uncertainty on their mental health. Using data from a large household panel and a difference‐in‐differences framework, we find no evidence for a decline in mental health or life satisfaction for various definitions of EU citizens relative to multiple control groups. These findings are robust to the specific mental health measure. We corroborate this finding by looking at various channels plausibly linking Brexit and European citizens’ mental health.
This study examines the effect of birthright citizenship on the outmigration behavior of migrant families in Germany. Using the introduction of birthright citizenship on 1 January 2000 and cohort-level data from the German Microcensus from 2001 to 2006, I exploit the differential treatment of birth cohorts around the enactment date to conduct a regression discontinuity analysis. Comparing the outmigration behavior of foreign-citizen families with children born in Germany directly before and after the cutoff, I find evidence that granting citizenship to immigrant children reduces the likelihood that their parents leave the country again.
The International Data Service Center (henceforth "IDSC") of the Institute for the Study of Labor (henceforth the "Institute" or "IZA") is the Institute's organizational unit which services its data needs as well as those of its various affiliated communities and the ambient associated research community at large. Since data are at the core of the Institute's makeup, its IDSC (idsc.iza.org) is a major contributor to its vision of a virtual institute. Besides a short presentation of the IDSC we focus on two of its major work areas: data documentation and remote computing.
This article analyses the savings behaviour of natives and immigrants in Germany. It is argued that uncertainty about future income and legal status (in case of immigrants) is a key component in the determination of the level of precautionary savings. Using the German dataset, we exploit a natural experiment arising from a change in the nationality law in Germany to estimate the importance of precautionary savings. Using a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach, we find a significant reduction in savings and remittances for immigrants after the easing of citizenship requirements, compared to the pre-reform period. Our parametric specification shows that introduction of the new nationality law reduces the gap in marginal propensity to save between natives and immigrants by up to 80%. These findings suggest that many of the differences in terms of the savings behaviour between natives and immigrants are driven by the savings arising from the uncertainties about future income and legal status rather than cultural differences.
Past empirical findings indicate that children’s health problems reduce married mothers’ employment but are inconclusive in the case of female heads. These studies use diverse disability definitions, samples, and specifications. This paper uses pooled SIPP panels to investigate the impact of alternative disability measures on maternal market work. Negative effects of several disability definitions on female heads’ and wives’ employment and hours at a point in time are found. In contrast, while female heads’ growth in work hours over time and probabilities of entering employment appear adversely affected by child disability, there is no evidence for analogous effects on wives.
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the empirical link between the naturalization of immigrants and their subsequent employment status in France from 1968 to 1999. Design/methodology/approach – For that purpose, longitudinal data coming from a panel dataset which follows almost 1 percent of the French population from 1968 to 1999 through information contained in the 1968, 1975, 1982, 1990 and 1999 French censuses were used. Control for the potential endogeneity of the naturalization process was through a bivariate probit model. Findings – It was found that naturalization has a significant positive relationship with immigrants' subsequent employability. This is particularly true for groups of immigrants who have a low probability of employment in the host country. Research limitations/implications – The dataset can only measure statistical association between naturalization and employment, given the lack of timing information. Interpretation in terms of causality is thus not permitted. Originality/value – The dataset used is especially valuable for studying social integration of immigrants, since it allows significant samples of immigrants, according to their country of origin, these groups being generally too small in other surveys.
Using data for West Germany from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyse the impact of transitions from unemployment to
full-time employment on life satisfaction, with special focus on the influence of job quality. We apply various indicators
of job quality (self-reported job satisfaction, wages, type of contract, and indicators of the fit between the worker and
job requirements). We control for the influence of income changes and other factors affecting life satisfaction, using a conditional
logit estimator. Results suggest that job quality only matters to some extent, and often people in bad jobs are still better
off than those who remain unemployed. This effect is statistically significant for most indicators of job quality, except
for workers with low job satisfaction and for those whose new job is much worse than their pre-unemployment job.
KeywordsUnemployment-Re-employment-Job quality-Life satisfaction
JEL ClassificationI31-J28
This article examines competing theoretical claims regarding how an individual's education will affect his or her likelihood of interracial marriage. I demonstrate that prior models of interracial marriage have failed to adequately distinguish the joint and marginal effects of education on interracial marriage and present a model capable of distinguishing these effects. I test this model on black-white interracial marriages using 1980, 1990, and 2000 U.S. census data. The results reveal partial support for status exchange theory within black male-white female unions and strong isolation of lower-class blacks from the interracial marriage market. Structural assimilation theory is not supported because the educational attainment of whites is not related in any consistent fashion to the likelihood of interracial marriage. The strong isolation of lower-class blacks from the interracial marriage market has gone unnoticed in prior research because of the failure of prior methods to distinguish joint and marginal effects.
A considerable amount of empirical research has been carried out on the economic impact of adults' health problems (e.g., Bartel and Taubman 1979; Luft 1975; Grossman and Benham 1974). A principal objective of the research has been to estimate the effects of these problems on the labor supply and earnings of illness victims. Policymakers and analysts have also expressed interest in these estimates as inputs to the process of allocating health sector resources among prevention and treatment programs for various diseases (Fuchs 1966; Fein 1958; Klarman 1965; Rice, Feldman, and White, 1976). By contrast, very few econometric studies have examined the economic impact of health problems on other family members. In particular, little is currently known about impacts on the spouses of illness victims or the parents of children with health problems. As a result, consideration of these impacts in policy analyses have been based on conjecture or, more frequently, ignored altogether. The present study focuses on the effect of chronic health problems and disabilities among children on parental labor supply and earnings. The severity of these problems, along with the long-term expense and difficulty of coping with them, raises the possibility of substantial impact on the psychological, physical, and economic health of the child's family. While relatively few children report such problems, a dramatic increase has occurred over the last decade. According to National Center for Health Statistics data (Table 8.1), the number of children with activity limitations due to chronic conditions nearly doubled from 1967 to 1978. The reasons for this increase are not presently known, but it seems likely that a variety of factors are involved, including more sophisticated medical therapies which increase survival rates for children born with physical impairments and the growing emphasis on "mainstreaming" and deinstitutionalization in public educational and social services programs.
Research on the labor-supply consequences of childbearing is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility. This study uses parental preferences for a mixed sibling-sex composition to construct instrumental variables (IV) estimates of the effect of childbearing on labor supply. IV estimates for women are significant but smaller than ordinary least-squares estimates. The IV are also smaller for more educated women and show no impact of family size on husbands' labor supply. A comparison of estimates using sibling-sex composition and twins instruments implies that the impact of a third child disappears when the child reaches age thirteen. Copyright 1998 by American Economic Association.
Fiscal rules are laws aimed at reducing the incentive to accumulate debt, and many countries adopt them to discipline local governments. Yet, their effectiveness is disputed because of commitment and enforcement problems. We study their impact applying a quasi-experimental design in Italy. In 1999, the central government imposed fiscal rules on municipal governments, and in 2001 relaxed them below 5,000 inhabitants. We exploit the before/after and discontinuous policy variation, and show that relaxing fiscal rules increases deficits and lowers taxes. The effect is larger if the mayor can be reelected, the number of parties is higher, and voters are older.
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).
This chapter studies the labour market integration of immigrants in Norway from lower-income countries and assesses whether their integration process is influenced by acquisition of Norwegian citizenship. It finds that there is no positive effect of citizenship on the labour market status of immigrants. For some groups, there are even small, but statistically significant, negative effects on employment and earnings when estimated with individual fixed effects to account for unobserved heterogeneity. The chapter also discusses the discrepancy between these findings and prior evidence from the United States in light of possible causal mechanisms and differences in the labour market institutions of the two host countries.
This study used two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households (1987 to 1988 and 1992 to 1994) to examine the effect of the transition to parenthood on the division of labor among married couples, hypothesizing that parenthood would produce a more differentiated gender division of labor, but that attitudes and preparental division of labor would moderate parenthood. There were no effects of parenthood nor direct or moderating effects of gender attitudes on husbands' employment or housework hours, with the exception that fathering more than one child results in slightly longer employment hours. Motherhood increases wives' housework hours and reduces employment hours. Wives' traditional gender attitudes reduce their employment, but not their housework. Women married to full-time breadwinners have the largest reductions in employment after motherhood. Last, wives' initial economic dependency increases wives' subsequent housework and husbands' employment. Parenthood crystallizes a gendered division of labor, largely by reshaping wives', not husbands', routine.
This chapter describes the numbers and characteristics of international migrants to selected developed countries, explores some of the economic factors motivating international migration, examines the impact of immigration on the receiving country's labor markets, discusses the extent to which immigrants assimilate to the receiving country's labor market, and presents several studies of immigrants' effects on the social welfare system. The chapter focuses on the experiences of Australia, Canada, and the United States. Increased immigration has a modest impact on the distribution of income, and most of these adverse affects fall on immigrants themselves. These effects may be small as a result of the effects that immigrants have on local labor demand or of changes in natives' migration patterns. First, there is evidence of a significant amount of immigrant assimilation in the US data, although there is less evidence of it in Australian, Canadian, and European data. This result implies that the adverse effects that US immigrants have on wages lessen as they spend more time in the United States. Second, this assimilation does not mean that immigrants' wages approach those of the median native.
Citizenship rights are associated with better economic opportunities for immigrants. This paper studies how in a country with a large fraction of temporary migrants the fertility decisions of foreign citizens respond to a change in the rules that regulate child legal status at birth. The introduction of birthright citizenship in Germany, following the introduction of the new German nationality law in 2000, represented a positive shock to the returns to investment in child human capital. Consistent with Becker's "quality-quantity" model of fertility, we find that birthright citizenship leads to a reduction in immigrant fertility and an improvement in health outcomes for the children affected by the reform.
This paper analyzes self-selection of returning immigrants. We propose an empirical model for this purpose, and apply it to Israeli-born immigrants who arrived in the United States during 1970–79 and returned to Israel during 1980–89. The results, based on analyses of the 5 per cent Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the 1980 and 1990 United States censuses, suggest that those who return from the United States to Israel have reached a higher level at school than those who remain in the United States. However, the income analysis suggests that, at each schooling level, those who returned to Israel would have been less successful in the United States labour market than Israelis of similar schooling (and other measured characteristics) who remained in the United States. These results were corroborated using Israeli census data that include information on returning Israelis.
Neoclassical economics and the new economics of labour migration posit very different motivations for international migration. The former assumes that people move abroad permanently to maximize lifetime earnings whereas the latter assumes they leave temporarily to overcome market deficiencies at home. As a result, the two models yield very different conceptualizations of return migration. We draw upon each theoretical model to derive predictions about how different variables are likely to influence the probability of return migration. We use data from the German Socio–economic Panel to test specific hypotheses derived from each model. Finding some support for both perspectives, we suggest that migrants may be heterogeneous with respect to their migratory motivations. If so, then parameters associated with the determinants of return migration in any population of international migration will reflect a blending of parameters associated with two distinct economic rationales. Equations estimated separately for remitting and non–remitting migrants lend support to this interpretation, meaning there may not be one unitary process of return migration, but several.
It is not unusual for immigrants to leave the host country and resettle permanently in their country of origin. This paper examines the interaction among some of the key factors that influence the return decision of immigrant households. These include purely economic variables such as wages of the two countries and the costs and benefits of accumulating country-specific human capital, but also subjective factors such as the intensity of the locational preferences of immigrant parents and children and of their desire to remain together in a single location. The analysis is conducted under alternative assumptions with respect to the role of parents and children in the household's decision-making process.
This paper analyzes labor market behavior of married migrant women. The theoretical analysis shows that migrants who intend to remain only temporarily in the host country are likely to exhibit a different labor market behavior than migrants who wish to stay permanently. The reason is that temporary migrants condition their behavior in the host country on the future expected economic situation in their home countries. In the empirical section, labor market participation behavior of married female migrants is analyzed, using data which allows differentiation between individuals who intend to remain permanently and individuals who intend to remain temporarily only.
This paper provides an introduction and "user guide" to Regression Discontinuity (RD) designs for empirical researchers. It presents the basic theory behind the research design, details when RD is likely to be valid or invalid given economic incentives, explains why it is considered a "quasi-experimental" design, and summarizes different ways (with their advantages and disadvantages) of estimating RD designs and the limitations of interpreting these estimates. Concepts are discussed using examples drawn from the growing body of empirical research using RD. ( JEL C21, C31)
A central concern about immigration is the integration into the labour market, not only of the first generation but also of subsequent generations. Little comparative work exists for Europe's largest economies. France, Germany and the UK have all become, perhaps unwittingly, countries with large immigrant populations albeit with very different ethnic compositions. Today, the descendants of these immigrants live and work in their parents' destination countries. This article presents and discusses comparative evidence on the performance of first and second-generation immigrants in these countries in terms of education, earnings and employment. Copyright © The Author(s). Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2010.
Migration flows are shaped by a complex combination of self-selection and out-selection mechanisms. In this paper, the authors analyze how existing diasporas (the stock of people born in a country and living in another one) affect the size and human-capital structure of current migration flows. The analysis exploits a bilateral data set on international migration by educational attainment from 195 countries to 30 developed countries in 1990 and 2000. Based on simple micro-foundations and controlling for various determinants of migration, the analysis finds that diasporas increase migration flows, lower the average educational level and lead to higher concentration of low-skill migrants. Interestingly, diasporas explain the majority of the variability of migration flows and selection. This suggests that, without changing the generosity of family reunion programs, education-based selection rules are likely to have a moderate impact. The results are highly robust to the econometric techniques, accounting for the large proportion of zeros and endogeneity problems.
In this paper, we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men's labor supply and hourly wage rates. The responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the PSID sample are examined separately, and we use fixed-effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts. Most notably, men's labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters.
For young male immigrants, naturalization facilitates assimilation into the U.S. labor market. Following naturalization, immigrants gain access to public-sector, white-collar, and union jobs, and wage growth acceleratesconsistent with removal of employment barriers. The faster wage growth of immigrants who naturalize might alternatively result from greater human capital investment prior to naturalization, stemming from a long-term commitment to U.S. labor markets, but there is no evidence that wage growth accelerates or the distribution of jobs improves until citizenship is attained. Finally, the gains from naturalization are greater for immigrants from less-developed countries and persist when we control for unobserved productivity.
We empirically examine the role of social networks in welfare participation using data on language spoken at home to better
infer networks within an area. Our empirical strategy asks whether being surrounded by others who speak the same language increases welfare use
more for those from high welfare-using language groups. This methodology allows us to include local area and language group
fixed effects and to control for the direct effect of being surrounded by one's language group; these controls eliminate many
ofthe problems in previous studies. The results strongly confirm the importance of networks in welfare participation.
We explore reasons for return migrations which are motivated by immigrants’ concerns about their children. We develop a simple model, where parents have paternalistic preferences. We show that parental concerns about the child may lead to an increase, or to a decrease in the tendency to return to the home country. Our model suggests that return plans of the parent may respond differently to the presence of daughters than to the presence of sons. The empirical test of our models relies on the exogeneity of children’s gender. We use a survey panel data set, containing information on both return realisations over 14 years, and intended return plans. Our results lend support to the hypothesis that children influence return plans of their parents. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2003
This paper analyses whether citizenship acquisition affects the labour market performance of immigrants in Germany. The study uses actual micro data from the employment sample of the Institute for Employment Research, which covers more than 80% of the entire labour force in Germany. The econometric analysis has been carried out using panel data techniques, which allow to disentangle the effects of self-selection and legal impact of citizenship acquisition. Estimates from a pooled OLS specification suggest the existence of a wage premium
for naturalized immigrants of both genders. Fixed effects estimates for males show an increased wage growth in the years following naturalization, consistent with the argument that naturalization increases the labour market opportunities of immigrants. Results for female employees indicate that the wage premium of naturalized women is solely the result of a positive self-selection process.
We estimate the effect of poor child health on the labor supply of mothers and fathers post welfare reform, using a national sample of mostly unwed parents and their children-a group at high risk of living in poverty. We account for the potential endogeneity of child health and find that having a young child in poor health reduces the mother's probability of working, the mother's hours of work, and the father's hours of work. These results suggest that children's health problems may diminish their parents' capacity to invest in their health.
This paper applies the theoretical literature on nonparametric bounds on treatment effects to the estimation of how limited English proficiency (LEP) affects wages and employment opportunities for Hispanic workers in the United States. I analyse the identifying power of several weak assumptions on treatment response and selection, and stress the interactions between LEP and education, occupation and immigration status. I show that the combination of two weak but credible assumptions provides informative upper bounds on the returns to language skills for certain subgroups of the population. Adding age at arrival as a monotone instrumental variable also provides informative lower bounds. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This paper studies marriages across black, white, and Asian racial lines. Marrying across racial lines is a rare event, even today. Interracial marriages account for approximately 1 percent of white marriages, 5 percent of black marriages, and 14 percent of Asian marriages. Following a brief history of the regulation of race and romance in America, I analyze interracial marriage using census data from 1880–2000, uncovering a rich set of cross-section and time-series patterns. I investigate the extent to which three different theories of interracial marriage can account for the patterns discovered. After also testing a social exchange theory and a search model, I find the data are most consistent with a Becker-style marriage market model in which objective criteria of a potential spouse, their race, and the social price of intermarriage are central.
This paper uses two recent UK surveys to investigate the determinants of language proficiency and the effect of language on earnings and employment probabilities of non-white immigrants. We address the problem of endogenous choice of language acquisition and measurement error in language variables. Our results show that language acquisition, employment probabilities, as well as earnings differ widely across non-white immigrants, according to their ethnic origin. Language proficiency has a positive effect on employment probabilities, and lack of English fluency leads to earning losses. Copyright 2003 Royal Economic Society.
Bootstrap-based improvements for inference with clustered errors
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Are young French jobseekers of ethnic immigrant origin discriminated against? A controlled experiment in the Paris area
- Duguet
Citizenship and the social integration of immigrants: Evidence from Germany's immigration reforms
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