International Immigration and Female Labour Supply

One of the key questions on international migration concerns its benefits and costs for the receiving economies. Assessing the overall net gain or loss to the economy from immigration is a challenging task both from a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Immigration can affect the receiving economy through several channels: wages or employment effects on native workers, changes in output structure, fiscal effects, effects on house prices, and so on. In this chapter we concentrate on one of the most important channel: the impact on wage and employment of natives. We consider the impact of immigration on a subgroup of the population that could particularly benefits from it, the female population. Moreover, because international migration may change the prevailing wage rates in the sectors where large number of migrants looks for a job, we focus on immigrants working in the household service sector. The underlying idea is that migrants could increase the availability of services to households, like child-care, housekeeping, or caring of elderly, reducing their market prices. This effect could induce women to change their decision on participation to the labour market. A first focus of the chapter is to answer to some specific questions: does immigration affect female labour market supply? Does it affect full-time and/or part-time jobs? Which native-born women are more affected? In doing that, we discuss more general issues related to the migration phenomenon. For instance, the first problem that arises is how to measure migration intensity and how to measure a change in the decision about participating or not to the labour market. After a brief general discussion we present, in the second section of the chapter, the definition of the variables and the empirical approach we adopt to estimate the relevant impacts on the female labour supply. The results are presented in the third section of the chapter. In the empirical analysis we use data of countries with quite different institutions (Australia, Germany, Switzerland, UK, and the US ). This gives us the opportunity to understand whether the effect of migrants on female labour supply is relevant in countries where policies are more or less supportive to families. These policy-related results are discussed in a separate section. Some conclusions follow in the last section of the chapter.