Cousins from overseas: the labour market impact of half a million Portuguese repatriates

Lara Bohnet, Susana Peralta and João Pereira Dos Santos ()

NOVAFRICA Working Paper Series from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Nova School of Business and Economics, NOVAFRICA

Abstract: This paper uses detailed census data to investigate the labour market consequences of a large, exogenous, labour market shock, exploiting the unexpected inflow of repatriates to Portugal following the end of the Portuguese Colonial War in 1974. The labour supply shock entails a composition dimension, as the repatriates were more than twice as likely to have secondary or higher education. We take advantage of the fact that most of the repatriates were Portuguese born to build novel shift-share instrumental variables based on their region of birth. We explore the impact on regional labour force participation, unemployment, employment, and entrepreneurship, for both male and female natives. We find substantial gender differences in the effects, with females absorbing the bulk of the shock. Native workers are driven out of employment as employees, with a sizeable 15% decrease for males and 55% for females. Men compensate for this loss by moving to low quality self-employment, while women move to inactivity. Our results are robust to changing the instrumental variable, the geographical unit of analysis, and to various sample restrictions.

Keywords: Immigration; labour market; labour supply; entrepreneurship; instrumental variable (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J20 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-his, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:unl:novafr:wp2114

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