A preliminary assessment of the effects of migration on the production structure in Europe: A labor task approach

We assess the effect of migration on the production structure in a selection of European countries for the pre-Great Recession period 2001-2009. We propose a labor-task approach where the inflow of migrants raises the relative supply of manual-physical (or simple) tasks and therefore favors simple-task intensive sectors. We use the US O*NET database in conjunction with European labor data to calculate the index of simple-task intensity at the industry and country level. The analysis confirms that a rise in employment migration rates has a generalized positive impact, but that value added increases significantly more in sectors that use more intensively simple tasks. A traditional shift-share instrument is used to overcome possible endogeneity problems.