The Impact of Immigration on Occupational Specialization of European Union Citizens

The Impact of Immigration on Occupational Specialization of European Union Citizens The article tests whether the impact of immigration on native workers differs depending on the business cycle. Previous studies proved that labor mobility and the effect of immigration differs with respect to the business cycle. For the expansionary years was found a sizable relocation of native workers to occupations with more interactive rather than manual content as a response to immigration. This is no longer the case for economy in recession period. However, there is null impact on native employment that does not change with the business cycle. The European labor market has been studied just in the period before crisis. Following the study about Spanish task specialization we would like to see if there is any change of impact of immigration on native task specialization in European Union. We split the data on the time period of expansion and the time period of economic crisis using the European Labor Force Survey. We would like to examine the effect of immigration on task specialization of natives on three groups of countries, West Europe, Germany and Middle and East Europe. The results show that the impact changes with the economic cycle and the country group.

Keywords: task specialization, instrumental variables, immigration, European labor market, business cycle