Giuntella Osea, Mazzonna Fabrizio
University of Oxford, Nuffield College and Blavatnik School of Government, 10 Merton Street, OX14JJ Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK; Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany.
Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Department of Economics, via Buffi 13, CH-6904 Lugano, Switzerland; Munich Center for the Economics of Ageing (MEA), Munich, Germany.
J Health Econ. 2015 Sep;43:140-53. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2015.06.006. Epub 2015 Jul 16.
This paper studies the effects of immigration on health. Specifically, we merge information on individual characteristics from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984-2009) with detailed local labour market characteristics, and we then exploit the longitudinal component of the data to determine how immigration affects the health of both immigrants and natives over time. We find that immigrants to Germany are healthier than natives upon their arrival (the healthy immigrant effect) but that immigrants' health deteriorates over time. We show that the convergence in health is heterogeneous across immigrants and occurs more rapidly among those working in more physically demanding jobs. Because immigrants are significantly more likely to work in strenuous occupations, we investigate whether changes in the spatial concentration of immigrants affect the health of the native population. Our results suggest that immigration reduces the likelihood that residents will report negative health outcomes. We show that these effects are concentrated in blue-collar occupations and are stronger among low-educated natives. Improvements in natives' average working conditions and workloads help explain the positive effects of immigration on the health of the native population.
本文研究移民对健康的影响。具体而言，我们将德国社会经济面板（1984 - 2009年）中关于个人特征的信息与详细的当地劳动力市场特征相结合，然后利用数据的纵向成分来确定移民如何随着时间影响移民和本地人的健康。我们发现，抵达德国的移民在刚到时比本地人更健康（健康移民效应），但移民的健康状况会随着时间推移而恶化。我们表明，健康状况的趋同因移民群体而异，并且在从事体力要求更高工作的人群中发生得更快。由于移民从事高强度职业的可能性显著更高，我们研究移民空间集中度的变化是否会影响本地人口的健康。我们的结果表明，移民降低了居民报告负面健康结果的可能性。我们表明，这些影响集中在蓝领职业中，并且在低学历本地人中更强。本地人的平均工作条件和工作量的改善有助于解释移民对本地人口健康的积极影响。
