Elsner, Benjamin

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Elsner, Benjamin
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Elsner, Benjamin

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  • Publication
    Taking the Skill Bias out of Global Migration
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2018-05)
    Biavaschi, Costanza 
    ;
    Burzynski, Michał 
    ;
    Elsner, Benjamin 
    ;
    Machado, Joël 
    Global migration is heavily skill-biased, with tertiary-educated workers being four times more likely to migrate than workers with a lower education. In this paper, we quantify the global impact of this skill bias in migration. Based on a quantitative multi-country model with trade, we compare the current world to a counterfactual with the same number of migrants, where all migrants are neutrally selected from their countries of origin. We find that most receiving countries benefit from the skill bias in migration, while a small number of sending countries is significantly worse off. The negative effect in many sending countries is completely eliminated — and often reversed — once we account for remittances and additional migration-related externalities. In a model with all our extensions, the average welfare effect of skill-biased migration in both OECD and non-OECD countries is positive.
      412
  • Publication
    Immigration and Redistribution
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2020-09)
    Elsner, Benjamin 
    ;
    Concannon, Jeff 
    One of the fundamental questions in the social sciences is whether modern welfare states can be sustained as countries welcome more immigrants. On theoretical grounds, the relationship between immigration and support for redistribution is ambiguous. Immigration may increase ethnic diversity, which may reduce the support for redistribution. On the other hand, natives may demand more redistribution as an insurance against labour market risks brought by immigration. In this chapter, we review the theoretical and empirical literature on immigration and redistribution from across the social sciences. We focus on two themes, namely the effect of immigration on natives’ support for redistribution, and the effect on the actual setting of tax and spending policies. Recent empirical evidence suggests that immigration lowers the support for redistribution and leads to lower taxation and spending. However, the magnitude of these effects appears to be highly context-dependent.
      373