Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Series: Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers
Creation-Date: 2021-10-14 
Revisions-Date: 2022-11-23
Number: 21-091/VI
Author-Name: Aksel Erbahar
Author-Workplace-Name: Erasmus University Rotterdam
Author-Name: Omer Tarik Gencosmanoglu
Author-Workplace-Name: Turkish Ministry of Trade
Title: Migrants and Imports: Evidence from Dutch Firms
Abstract: This paper examines the effect of hiring migrants on firms’ imports using a rich employeremployee dataset from the Netherlands for 2010-2017. We use an instrumental variables strategy, and find that firms that employ migrants from a high-income country are more likely to import from that country. Our benchmark specification indicates that a one standard deviation increase in the share of migrant workers from a certain country raises their employer’s probability of importing from those workers’ origin country by 6.6 percentage points, explaining about a fifth of the standard deviation of importing from a given country. This result is robust to a battery of sensitivity checks, but does not hold for middle- and low-income countries. Digging deeper, we find that the effects are largely driven by migrants working in trade intermediaries that import final goods and inputs. Our results suggest that migrants help erode informational barriers and enable their employers to source goods from abroad
Classification-JEL: F14, F16, F22
Keywords: migration, imports, market knowledge, employer-employee 
File-URL: https://papers.tinbergen.nl/21091.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
File-Size: 2.444.740 bytes
Handle: RePEc:tin:wpaper:20210091