Immigrants have increased their participation in Spanish labour supply from less than 3 percent in 1996 to more than 13 percent in 2005. Using the factor proportion model of production, this paper analyses whether this labour supply shock has affected the industrial structure of Spanish regions. Our best specification suggests the need to include time varying region-specific effects to capture differences in technology and prices across regions. Our results confirm that, first, labour endowment differences across regions help to explain the pattern of industry specialisation across region. Second, immigrants and natives act as complementary factors in most industries. Third, the importance of factor endowment changes is relatively small compared to production technique changes and idiosyncratic industry changes in explaining the overall changes in industrial structure over 1996-2005, being only important in the case of Building, a sector where foreign workers represent an important share of its total labour force.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie) in its series Working Papers. Serie EC with number
2009-01.
Did you know? All full texts are decentralized with the publishers, none reside on this server, thus making it possible to offer this service for free to all parties.