Browsing by Subject "occupations"

The topic of this thesis is to explore the impact of immigration on the task specialization of natives. According to the literature, immigration does not have a significant negative impact on the employment nor the wages of natives. A one possible reason for this can be imperfect substitutability which means that natives and immigrants with similar education are not perfect substitutes and thus, they do not compete for the same jobs. Natives may have a comparative advantage in interactive tasks and immigrants in manual tasks. An exact research question is to investigate if less educated natives locate to less manual and more interactive jobs as the shares of similarly educated foreign-born people rise. This is implemented by constructing variables which describe the manual and interactive task intensities of different occupation classes. Peri and Sparber (2009) and Amuedo-Dorantes and de la Rica (2011) have investigated similar questions and therefore, their studies are the main references of this thesis. The data of this study is provided by Ipums International and O*Net data from the US Department of Labor. The first of these two is census microdata from France and it includes eight samples between the years 1962 and 2011. The second dataset contains numerical values which describe the importance of different abilities of different occupations. The analysis is made by applying the method of ordinary least squares and the method of instrumental variables. The instrumental variable for the shares of foreign-born workers is formed by imputing the shares of immigrants from several source countries, based on the distribution of immigrant groups across regions in the year 1962. The results support the hypothesis rather well. A one percentage point increase in the foreign-born share of less educated labour force lowers the manual-to-interactive task ratio of natives by approximately two percentages on average. However, the results regarding to different demographic groups are varied. The most unexpected observation is that the share of female immigrants affects the task specialization of both male and female natives much more than share of male immigrants does. In addition, education, age, the industry of occupation, and the business cycle of an economy seem to have impact on the possibilities of natives to shift to less manual and more interactive tasks. The results suggest that inflows of less educated immigrants indeed push less educated natives towards less manual and more interactive jobs. Nonetheless, because the estimates of previous studies have been smaller, it is likely that the estimates of this thesis are biased upward and the real impact of immigration on the task specialization of natives is more moderate.