Migration, Labor Tasks and Production Structure in Europe

This paper assesses the effect of the immigration on the production struc- ture in a selection of European countries in 2001-2009 with a task-based ap- proach. The inflow of immigrants represents an increase in the relative supply of manual-physical (or simple) tasks, hence favoring simple-task intensive sec- tors. We use a new OECD dataset, PIAAC, to calculate the index of simple- task intensity at the country-industry level. The analysis confirms that the increase in migration stocks caused a positive impact on the value added of sectors that use more intensively simple tasks. These effects are more intense when considering countries as Italy and Spain characterized by a recent, rapid and intense inflow of migrants. Endogeneity issues are discussed and instru- ments based on a gravity approach are used in estimation.