Viewing 4 posts categorized under Migration
October 1, 2024
How do foreign workers affect firm productivity in Portugal? This is seemingly relevant for a country now experiencing substantial immigration flows, with a potentially strong impact on firm performance and labor market dynamics.
This study links employer- and employee-level data with balance sheet information and finds that the presence of immigrant workers does not have an unconditional effect on firm productivity. However, this finding masks a more nuanced and complex reality that emerges when different types of firms are examined more closely.
September 27, 2019
Migration might constitute one possible pathway to mitigating the effects of the aging population on the financial stability of pension systems as migrant flows tend to present younger age-structures than their receiving countries. While this argument was proposed a few decades ago and subject to discussion ever since, there have only been a few empirical studies striving to assess the role of migration in the financial sustainability of public pension systems.
February 20, 2019
Fixed costs associated with learning about demand and setting up distribution networks are expected to be lower when there are more potential contacts in the destination market, suggesting a greater probability of market entry and larger export revenues. This paper matches historically-determined emigration stocks with detailed firm-level data from Portugal to examine the effect of migrant networks on export outcomes.
Portugal offers unique historical features for this analysis. First, the motives and timing of the sizable emigration flows observed in the country during the _Estado Novo _authoritarian regime, along with their steep fall in the aftermath of the democratic revolution of 1974, alleviate concerns of reverse causality.
April 12, 2018
The study of how labor supply shocks, especially immigration, affect labor market conditions has been a long-lasting concern in empirical labor economics. The textbook model of a competitive labor market suggests that high levels of immigration should lower the wage of competing workers. Despite the common sense intuition behind the theory, existing empirical literature offers contradictory evidence.
This article provides a reappraisal of the evidence from the influx that has been unique in the recent European history, the flood of more than half million returnees from Mozambique and Angola to Portugal in the mid-1970s.