Impact of cultural diversity on local labor markets. Evidence from Greece's “age of mass migration”

Abstract

AbstractThis paper analyzes how the interaction of ethnicities and cultures impacts on productivity and employment on Greek local labor markets, within the 20‐year interval between 1991 and 2011. We compute two alternative proxies for cultural diversity, namely the fractionalization and the polarization index, using information on 118 countries of origin. We also account for the potential endogenous allocation of individuals across local labor markets by employing a “shift‐share” instrument, exploiting the fact that networks play an important role in the settlement patterns of recent migrants. Our identification strategy indicates that the contribution of diversity in terms of birthplace is positive, at least up to a certain point. This finding appears to be robust and not driven by the inclusion of further controls, outliers, spatial autocorrelation, and selection on unobservables. Interestingly, we find that ethnic heterogeneity helps employment and productivity by promoting sectoral diversity.