Immigrants' location choice in Belgium

Hubert Jayet, Glenn Rayp, Ilse Ruyssen and Nadiya Ukrayinchuk

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper analyses migratory streams to Belgian municipalities between 1994-2007. The Belgian population register constitutes a rich and unique database of yearly migrant inflows and stocks broken down by nationality, which allows us to empirically explain the location choice of immigrants at municipality level. Speci cally, we aim at separating the network ef- fect, captured by the number of previous arrivals, from other location-speci c characteristics such as local labor or housing market conditions and the presence of public amenities. We expect labor and housing market variables to operate at diff erent levels and develop a fixed eff ects nested model of location choice in which an immigrant fi rst chooses a broad area, roughly corresponding to a labor market, and subsequently chooses a municipality within this area. We fi nd that the spatial repartition of immigrants in Belgium is determined by both network eff ects and local characteristics. The determinants of local attractiveness vary by nationality, as expected, but for all nationalities, they seem to dominate the impact of network eff ects.

Keywords: Migration; Location choice; Network e ffects; Nested logit; Immigrants; Belgium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-06-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-mig and nep-ure
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.univ-lille.fr/hal-01006864v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.univ-lille.fr/hal-01006864v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Immigrants’ location choice in Belgium (2016)
Working Paper: Immigrants’ location choice in Belgium (2016)
Working Paper: Immigrants’ location choice in Belgium (2016)
Working Paper: Immigrants’ location choice in Belgium (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-01006864

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().