Should Germany Have Built a New Wall?Macroeconomic Lessons from the 2015-18 Refugee Wave

Christopher Busch, Dirk Krueger, Alexander Ludwig, Irina Popova and Zainab Iftikhar
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Irina Popova: Goethe University Frankfurt

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: In 2015-2016 Germany experienced a wave of predominantly low-skilled refugee immigration. We evaluate its macroeconomic and distributional e?ects using a quan-titative overlapping generations model calibrated using German micro data to repli-cate education and productivity di?erentials between foreign born and native workers. Workers are modelled as imperfect substitutes in aggregate production leading to en-dogenous wage di?erentials. We simulate the dynamic e?ects of this refugee wave, with speci?c focus on the welfare impact on low skilled natives. Our results indicate that the small losses this group su?ers can be compensated by welfare gains of other parts of the native population.

Keywords: Immigration; Refugees; Overlapping Generations; Demographic Change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E20 F22 H55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 81 pages
Date: 2020-04-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Should Germany have built a new wall? Macroeconomic lessons from the 2015-18 refugee wave (2020)
Working Paper: Should Germany Have Built a New Wall? Macroeconomic Lessons from the 2015-18 Refugee Wave (2020)
Working Paper: Should Germany Have Built a New Wall? Macroeconomic Lessons from the 2015-18 Refugee Wave (2020)
Working Paper: Should Germany Have Built a New Wall? Macroeconomic Lessons from the 2015-18 Refugee Wave (2020)
Working Paper: Should Germany Have Built a New Wall? Macroeconomic Lessons from the 2015-18 Refugee Wave (2020)
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