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[eng] Besides introduction and conclusions, the thesis is composed by three empirical chapters that investigate the impact of immigration on three different outcomes of the native population, namely employment, wages and human capital accumulation. Specifically, the second chapter of the thesis, Immigration and Native Employment. Evidence from Italian Provinces in the Aftermath of the Great Recession, exploits the variability in the incidence of recent immigration inflows and the change in native employment in the Italian provinces to shed light on the impact of immigration on employment in rigid local labor markets. The study focuses on the period that followed the financial and sovereign debt crises, which strongly hit the labor markets of the Italian provinces. The results reveal a negligible overall impact of immigration on provincial employment which, however, hides differentiated impacts for different groups of natives. Employment responses to immigration shocks vary greatly depending on the skills and gender of the natives. After three rounds of revision with three referees, this chapter has been published as article in the peer-reviewed journal Papers in Regional Science. If the second chapter analyzes the impact of immigration on quantities (i.e. employment), the third one focuses instead on the effects on prices (i.e. wages), which is the other important element that immigrant inflows can influence. In this regard, this chapter, titled On the Heterogeneous Impact of Immigrants on the Distribution of Native Wages. Evidence from Recent Immigrants in Italian Provinces, provides new evidence on the extent to which immigrants affect the wage structure of the local labor markets of the host countries by proposing a methodology that combines the assessment of the impact of immigration along the native wage distribution, with a two-steps procedure that controls for changes in the composition of the native workforce, and for the endogenous allocation of immigrants across local labor markets. The analysis is carried out for Italy, which is a peculiar country as is characterized by relatively rigid product and labor markets and by well-known regional disparities, during a period of time dominated by the coexistence of the economic downturn and by the substantial increase of the migratory inflows of low-skilled individuals. The results contradict the simplistic belief that immigrants are indistinctly responsible for the decrease in native wages, and highlight instead two interesting facts. First, in line with the existing literature, foreign-born workers do not affect significantly the native average wages. Second, in terms of the impact along the native wage distribution, the effect that immigrants exert is non-negative, not even for those natives located in the lower part of the wage Distribution (which, in principle, are more similar in terms of job characteristics to immigrants, and therefore are expected experience the larger wage losses). If anything, the estimates identify instead a positive impact in the upper part of the wage distribution, which is particularly valid in the case of native women residing in the Northern provinces. However, in the more demanding specifications (that is, those with province-specific trends) this positive effect is only marginally significant. The fourth chapter of the thesis conducts instead a complementary analysis. In other words, this chapter, titled Immigration, Local Specialization in Low-skilled Sectors and Native Education. Evidence from some EU Countries, investigates the long-run native education responses to immigration in a set of European countries - namely, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain - over the period 1980-2010. The analysis in this chapter sheds lights on a dimension of the impact of immigration that has been surprisingly scarcely explored in the previous literature, although it may have interesting consequences. Indeed, to measure the native education responses to immigration may provide evidence on the extent of substitutability or rather complementarity between immigrants and natives. The empirical analysis of this chapter is divided into two parts. The first, assesses the direct and indirect effects of immigration on native schooling, as well as the overall effect that encompasses the other two. Overall, the results indicate that in the period and countries considered, the presence of immigrants is associated with a reduction in the probability of natives to acquire at least upper-secondary education. The second part also considers the local employment structure and analyzes how the links between immigration and sectoral composition affect the decision of natives to invest in human capital. More in detail, I consider the specialization in low-skilled type of sectors (that is, those that require a low amount of human capital). All in all, the results indicate that the negative native education responses previously identified are stronger in regions specialized in low-skilled sectors.

Treballs Finals del Màster d'Economia, Facultat d'Economia i Empresa, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2016-2017, Tutor: Enrique López-Bazo, The aim of this paper is to disentangle, from an empirical point of view, the economic impact of immigration into the labor markets of the Italian administrative regions. To this purpose, we have followed the empirical strategy set by Basso and Peri (2015). In order to construct the dataset, we have used information drawn from the Labor Force Survey (LFS) conducted by the National Statistic Office of Italy (ISTAT). We have performed several empirical analyses. First of all, we have computed the aggregate correlation between the change in natives’ employment and the change in immigrant population. Then, in order to disentangle the spatial correlations between foreign-born and domestic workers (see Borjas, 2014), we have divided the native population into eight education-experience cells, and computed the correlations between immigrants and natives within skill location cells. In a further step, we have introduced in our baseline specification a proxy for the labor demand growth, namely the “Bartik” instrument. Finally, to address the endogeneity issue and therefore to conclude on the causal relationship between immigrants and natives’ labor market performances, we have performed an IV/2SLS approach, using the so-called “shift-share” instrument. In general terms, the results obtained indicate that the impact of immigration on native employment is positive or null.

Whether host countries economically benefit or not from immigration is a longstanding debate. In this paper, by taking advantage of the consistent variation of foreign-born workers' settlements across local labor market, we investigate the impact of immigration on native employment in Italy over the period 2009-2017. Both the country and the time span considered represent an interesting novelty that adds a further piece of evidence to the existing literature. Despite the fact that immigration has recently become a major issue, the studies on the impact of immigration into Italy are indeed relatively scarce. In addition, the peculiar institutional framework of Italy, that plays a crucial role in the extent to which local labor markets are able to absorb immigration-induced supply shocks, makes this analysis particularly relevant. Likewise, the period analyzed is of extreme interest since it is characterized by the combination of the economic downturn and by an unprecedented increase of the migratory in inflows. Overall, the results contradict the belief that immigrants \take away jobs from natives" and present a scenario in which foreign-born workers have an average negligible impact on native employment opportunities. Consistently with the canonical model of immigration however, when distinguishing the native population by education levels, the results indicate a positive impact on high-educated natives and a strong negative one on low-educated. Nevertheless, after controlling for immigrants’ “skill-downgrading” and for natives' over-education, the negative impact estimated for the latter experiences a consistent reduction.