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The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past large inflows of lowskilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper we examine if the flow of immigrants as actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants - many of them specialized in the supply of child care - arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that newly arrived immigrant female workers have increased the number of native births by roughly 2 per cent. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrants has positively affected native fertility choice.

Many refugees remain for long time in host countries and to assess their impact on the welfare of local communities is essential for policy design. We focus on Uganda, a country that hosts the larg...

During the first wave of globalization, Argentina was among the most internationally integrated economies, experiencing a rising trend in trade openness and a tremendous increase in labor due to migration. In this paper, we empirically show the central role immigration had in boosting exports and imports in the years 1870–1913 by considering Argentine bilateral trade and migration from eight European countries (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and United Kingdom). We use a migration-augmented gravity model to estimate the contribution of the massive inflows of Europeans, and we find that the main pro-trade effect was on imports: a percent 10% increase in migrants from a particular country would increase imports by up to 8% from that same country. We do not find the same effect on exports. The disproportionate decrease in transportation rather than communication costs may explain why the latter are relatively more decisive for exports than for imports. To overcome the problem of reverse causality and endogeneity, we use migration flows to the US from the eight European countries as an instrumental variable. In so doing, we aim at capturing the same push (but not Argentine pull) factors inducing European out-migration.

The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past, large inflows of low-skilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this paper, we examine if immigration has actually affected fertility exploiting the natural experiment occurred in Italy in 2007, when a large inflow of migrants—many of them specialized in the supply of child care—arrived unexpectedly. With a difference-in-differences method, we show that immigrant female workers have increased native births by a number that ranges roughly from 2% to 4%. We validate our result by the implementation of an instrumental variable approach and several robustness tests, all concluding that the increase in the supply of child-care services by immigrant women has positively affected native fertility.

Recently in Italy immigration has been at the centre of public debates. Nonetheless, the still growing literature has focused mainly on the experience of old settlement countries and has looked at single aspects of the phenomenon. In order to guide effective local policy intervention, we offer an exhaustive view of immigration in Italy. We combine the presentation of stylized facts from available data, based on descriptive analyses, with a review of existing studies. Our conclusions tell that evidence available for Italy does not match the policy relevance of the issue and also identify areas where solid evidence is needed.