Isolating the Network Effect of Immigrants on Trade

By Mariya Aleksynska, Giovanni Peri. Social Science Research Network, 2014

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Within the migration-trade nexus literature, this paper proposes a more carefully defined measure of migration business networks, and quantifies its impact on bilateral trade. Using cross-sectional data and controlling for the overall bilateral stock of migrants, the share of migrants employed in managerial/business-related occupations has a strong additional effect on trade, and especially on exports. Those immigrants should be the ones directly involved in the diffusion and transmission of information relevant for companies trading with other countries. Their presence is found to increase the volume of trade beyond the already known effect of immigrants or highly educated immigrants. When we control for the presence of highly educated immigrants, the share of immigrants in business network occupations shows a particularly large effect on trade in differentiated goods. Specifically, we find that highly educated individuals in business-related occupations are those contributing to export by the largest margin. Business network effects seem particularly important in stimulating exports to culturally different countries, such as those with different legal origin.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ff75be4e619e7f606cb33313ed9ba00b1d1eb46

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Citations in the corpus

Migrant Networks and Trade: The Vietnamese Boat People as a Natural Experiment (2018, unknown): “Aleksynska and Peri (2011) examine migrants occupations, specifically focusing upon immigrants in the OECD employed in management positions, which they argue are those most likely to establish business connections.”
Migrants, Ancestors, and Foreign Investments (2018, background): “Also see Head and Ries (1998), Combes, Lafourcade, and Mayer (2005), Garmendia, Llano, Minondo, and Requena (2012), and Aleksynska and Peri (2014) for the relationship between common ancestry and trade and Bhattacharya and Groznik (2008) for its relationship with FDI.”