Mardi | 2017-02-28
16h00-17h20 en salle des thèses

Daniel MIRZA – Rémi BAZILLIER – Francesco MAGRIS

This paper shows that policies which favor (im)-migration may actually provoke unexpected consequences by increasing the outflows of previously settled migrants. To do so, we set a 3-country theory where already settled migrants in one country of residence respond to economic and policy incentives making them move back to their country of origin or a third country. In particular, we show that outmigration from the residence country increases with a unilateral openness of that country to new migrants. Outmigration increases even further with a multilateral openness to migration of all countries. The theory has an important implication for Schengen agreements: it predicts that openness of borders through Schengen should unambiguously increase the exit of previously settled migrants. We use the implementation of these agreements as a quasi-natural experiment, exploiting the different timing in their implementation. We use recently available data on outmigration from the OECD and a difference-in-difference approach to show that the bilateral adoption of Schengen is estimated to increase out-migration by one-third.