Homeward Bound FDI: Are Migrants a Bridge over Trouble Finance?
Migrants can lower cross-border investment barriers, help investors by providing information about their homeland and reduce transaction costs by sharing expertise on regulations, customs and procedures. In addition to generating these well-known networking effects, migrants can also provide valuable information about local finance, thereby easing the credit constraints foreign investors faced during the 2007 financial crisis. This paper sheds new light on the underlying mechanisms through which migration may affect foreign investment in the migrant's homeland by distinguishing between the effects on FDI's intensive and extensive margins. Gravity estimates for 140 countries for the period 2…
Immigration, factor endowments and the productive structure of Spanish regions, 1996-2005.
The participation of immigrants in the Spanish labour market has increased from less than 3% in 1996 to more than 13% in 2005. The factor proportion model of production was used to examine the impact of such a large labour supply shock on the industrial structure of Spanish regions. The results confirm that, first, labour endowment differences across regions help to explain the regional patterns of industry specialization. Second, immigrants and natives act as complementary factors in most industries. Third, the importance of immigration is relatively small compared with production technique changes and idiosyncratic industry changes in explaining the overall changes in industrial structure. …
Migration and fdi: the role of job skills
Abstract Using a multi-country gravity framework, this paper models and quantifies the relevance of migrants' job position in fostering Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). High-skilled migrants are defined as those individuals born in the investors' home/host country occupying managerial or professional positions in the host/home country of investment. Our estimates show that higher shares of migrants with management skills in a given country promote FDI into that country. In contrast, an increase in the share of migrants in non-qualified positions (regardless of their educational attainment) has a negative impact on FDI decisions. These findings highlight that the FDI-enhancing effect of migr…
International trade and migrant networks: Is It really about qualifications?
Personal characteristics of migrants could help to strengthen the impact of migrant networks on bilateral trade. While most of the attention has been focused on immigrants' educational attainment, this paper focuses on the relevance of the tasks carried out by migrants. Our empirical results confirm that the existence of a large number of foreign-born workers with managerial duties is critical to explain the reduction of transaction costs caused by migrant networks.