Migration and natives' inequality: Evidence from Italian local labor markets

Abstract

Using individual data from the Italian Labor Force Survey, we investigate the impact of immigration on the Gini index and the percentile ratio (p90/p10) at the household level within Labor Market Areas (LMAs) in Italy from 2008 to 2018. To identify the effect of immigration we construct a composite index based on demographic and occupation-related characteristics that captures the degree of similarity between immigrants and natives across LMAs. This approach addresses the limitations of the standard cell segmentation method and allows us to estimate the impact of immigration on the entire distribution of natives' earnings. To address endogeneity concerns we use an instrument proposed by Card, which exploits the tendency of immigrants to migrate to areas with a pre-existing group of immigrants of the same ethnicity. Our findings show that immigration reduces income inequality among natives and the effect is larger in those LMAs where the degree of similarity between immigrants and natives is higher. We also find that immigration has a positive effect on natives' labor income in occupations that require language skills, while the effect is not significant in low/no skilled jobs that only require basic language skills, or highly skilled jobs where interaction between immigrants and natives is limited.