Hochschulschrift:
Dissertation, University of Zurich, 2015
Anmerkungen:
Enthält 3 Beiträge
Beschreibung:
This cumulative dissertation consists of three essays. The first essays with the title ‘‘The Labor Market Effect of Opening the Border: Evidence from Switzerland’’ analyses the effect of opening the labor market for workers from the European Union in Switzerland after 1999. We exploit that this opening followed two different schedules for two different parts of the country. We find that the abolition of immigration restrictions increased the share of new immigrants by four percentage points and had no effect on wages and hours worked of natives in the aggregate but important heterogeneous effects on skill groups. The second essay with the title ‘‘Which Factors Drive the Skill-Mix of Immigrants in the Long-Run?’’ investigates, why newly arriving immigrants in developed countries have become increasingly highly educated. Using evidence from Switzerland between 1980 and 2010, we find that the improvement in the educational attainment in the origin countries of immigrants and the polarization of skill demand in the destinations are the two dominant factors explaining together the long-run changes in the skill-mix of newly arriving immigrants. In the third essays with the title ‘‘Demand Forces of Technical Change’’ we ask whether and to which extent the rising Chinese middle class fuels growth and innovation in the manufacturing sector in China. We exploit the fact, that consumers reshuffle their consumption bundle to more luxurious goods as they become richer, to construct measures of (expected) market size for different durable goods. We find the changes in market size of a durable goods, driven by the raise of the middle class, indeed drives productivity in the manufacturing sector producing this durable good.