Changes in the sentiment of migration-related news published in destination countries affect the timing of migrants’ journeys to these countries. Using geo-localized data on migrants in Libya and the complete record of news articles in their country of destination, this paper shows that a worsening news sentiment leads to migrants staying longer in Libya, slowing down their journeys to their final destinations. The paper validates these results by showing that the effect is concentrated in locations with internet connections. The results indicate that changes in news sentiment have a significant impact only for some groups of migrants and under specific conditions, suggesting a limited effect on overall migrant movements. Finally, the paper provides suggestive evidence that a worsening news sentiment in the preferred destination induces substitution across destination countries, yet it does not make migrants return to their country of origin.
Categoria: Under review
M. Battaglini, V. Leone Sciabolazza, Lin M., E. Patacchini, Unobserve Contributions and Political Influence: Evidence From the Death of Top Donors, NBER w32649
It has long been observed that there is little money in U.S. politics compared to the stakes. But what if contributions are not fully observable or non-monetary in nature and thus not easily quantifiable? We study this question with a new data set on the top 1000 donors in U.S. congressional races. Since top donors do not randomly support candidates, we propose an identification strategy based on information about top donors’ deaths and the observed variations in candidates’ performance after these events. The death of a top donor significantly decreases a candidate’s chances of being elected in the current and future election cycles. Moreover, it affects the legislative activities of elected candidates. These effects do not depend on top donors’ monetary contributions to a candidate but on their prominence and their total contributions during the election campaign.
S. Barabuffi, V. Costantini, V. Leone Sciabolazza, E. Paglialunga (2021), Knowledge spillovers through skilled-workers migration network: evidence from OECD countries.
In this paper we investigate the role of international high-skilled migration in diffusing innovation from origin to destination countries by assessing their impact on the production of knowledge (patents) in host countries. A problem with our analysis is that a better innovation performance in one country can be mechanically correlated with a higher presence of high-skilled immigrants, but not necessarily be determined by it. For this reason, we propose a new identification strategy based on a control function approach to account for migrants’ self-selection into the migration network and sort out endogeneity concerns from our estimates. The model is tested on a panel database of 20 OECD countries from 1987 to 2016. Our results show that high-skilled migration magnifies the effect of internal knowledge in improving national innovation performances. On the contrary, middle or low-skilled migration flows have no statistically significant effect on innovation production. Furthermore, knowledge spillovers are stronger if origin and destination countries assign similar share of their public R\&D budget across the same technological and socio-economic goals. Finally, the role of high-skilled migrants is heterogeneous across countries and their contribution is most valuable when host countries are still on a learning path.