Essays in the economics of immigration

This thesis consists of three chapters on the Economics of Immigration. In the first chapter, I analyze the effect of historical emigration on current attitudes towards immigration in central and southern Italy. To do so, I collect data on Italian emigrants by municipality from the Ellis Island archives in the period 1892-1924. I estimate, then, the causal effect of emigration on a series of outcomes used to measure attitudes towards immigrants through an IV strategy, by exploiting exogenous variation in proximity to departure port to the U.S. during years 1892-1924. I find that emigration has a negative and significant long-run effect on attitudes towards immigration. In particular, higher historical emigration reduces the propensity to open refugees reception centers, social expenditure, volunteers in the non-profit organizations and significantly decreases political support for more inclusive parties. The same pattern is found at individual level, as local politicians are less likely to affiliate to inclusive parties. The second chapter (which is a joint work with S. Manfredonia) investigates the longrun effect of historical emigration on foreign direct investment (FDI). Again, we use data on emigrants to Ellis Island from Central and Southern Italian municipalities during the Age of Mass Migration (1892-1924). To deal with potential endogeneity issues, we adopt an instrumental variables strategy by exploiting variation in proximity to closest departure port. We find that a one-percent increase in historical emigration boosts inward FDI from the U.S. by 3.4 p.p. On the other hand, we find mixed evidence on the effect of historical emigration on outward FDI. In the third chapter, I analyze whether (correct) information provision on immigration is more effective than contact in shaping attitudes towards immigration. I collect data from a randomized experiment in 18 middle- and high-school classes in the city of Rome. Half of the classes meet a refugee from Mauritania, whereas the rest of them are given a lecture on the figures and numbers on immigration in Italy and the world. On average, students increase their attitudes towards immigration after the information treatment more than they do after the contact treatment, whereas neither treatment affects feelings associated to immigrants. However, treatments’ effectiveness is largely affected by students’ individual characteristics and, inparticular, baseline relations with immigrants and school type