Essays on Migration and Institutional Change: Evidence from the UK

This thesis is composed by three chapter. The first chapter is a survey of the literature on the selection and the economic impact of migration in the destination countries. The first part provides a review of the theoretical literature on the determinants and the selectivity of migration by focusing on how immigrants self select with respect to unobservable or observable characteristics.The second part presents the literature on the impact of immigration on the labor market outcomes of natives by taking into account the main theoretical models and discussing the challenges of the empirical evidences. Chapter 2 reviews the admission policies within the European Union (EU). In recent year, the EU has tried to harmonize the selection policies by promoting immigration of highly skilled people in order to compensate labor shortages in the face of a growing global competition. However, Member States appear to be reluctant to adopt common rules on admission of third country nationals. In recent years skill-selective immigration policies have been implemented in several developed countries. However, little evidence exists to date documenting their impact on the local labor markets. Chapter 3 aims to address this gap by focusing on a reform introduced in the UK in 2011 to re-orient economic migration towards skills that are the most in need of the economy.This analysis takes advantage of a 'natural' experiment in the UK by investigating how tightness in a selective policy affects the selectivity and the quality of immigrants and the effects on real shortages in the labor market. This challenge is possible under a difference-in-difference (DID) analysis and a triple-difference estimation, which estimates the impact of a policy interpreted as an exogenous shock made by the Government in the selection of people in the labor market.